Midnight Run
by kanonkita
Summary: About a year after the end of TFP, Knock Out exhibits his defiance of having to come back to Earth for a bit by adopting a new human. Starscream tries to get used to new circumstances. Something seems a little off with the new regime on Cybertron. And whatever did happen to all the other Cons who used to be on the Nemesis? Set in the same AU as my fic "Failing and Flying."
1. Prologuey

**I'm moving what was originally the story notes into a prologue just so that the revised first chapter will actually show up as a new chapter.**

This story came about from the simple amusing image of Knock Out running into a nerdy human girl who was all too willing to gush over his lustrous finish and robotic charms, and rapidly morphed into an outlet for my desires to explore various things that might happen after the conclusion of Transformers: Prime. It ended up being a Humanformers story instead of a straight-up Transformers story because I also became interested in exploring various ways that things would be different for our Cybertronian friends if they had somewhat squishier, human-sized forms. (I've actually got a whole slew of stories I'll be writing on that matter.) Eventually, this will be a romance (or several), but there's a lot of other stuff going on, so I hope no one gets too frustrated waiting for that plot to jump into action.

My concept of these "humanformers" is that they're composed of nanobots, essentially, and in "human" form, they would look and feel like a human on the outside, but they're still made of cybermatter. In 'bot mode, they are not people in mech suits so much as just... mech suits. I'll go into more niggly details at some point in the story, but just wanted to make sure no one gets confused by our preconceived notions of how Transformers work. :)

Anyway, enjoy the story, and don't forget to comment! I love to know what my readers are thinking and get constructive feedback.

Note: this fic was up before, but I took it down to post some revisions.


	2. Chapter 1

**CHAPTER ONE: IN WHICH KNOCK OUT MEETS A NEW HUMAN**

The war was over, and the Autobots had won.

At least, Knock Out was pretty sure that they had.

They'd sort of temporarily killed Megatron, and the remaining Decepticon forces had fled. They'd restored Cybertron to all its shining glory, moved back there, and started welcoming some of their old friends home again. They'd even started rebuilding their capital city. Those all seemed like the sorts of things that constituted winning to Knock Out. He'd even listed his official reason for defecting the Decepticon cause as "joining the winning team."

So, why—why, why, _why in the Pit—_ were they _back on Earth?_

They'd been here for four months already, and he still didn't understand it. Oh, they talked about coming to round up the remaining Decepticons so that they didn't wreak havoc on Earth, but Knock Out had pointed out that there weren't really any Decepticons left on Earth—just a bunch of 'bots who'd had the good sense to get as far away from Megatron as they could after they landed on this rock. His new Autobot "friends" had just hemmed and hawed and muttered things about holding people accountable for war crimes. Knock Out had raised his eyebrows at that, but wasn't about to ask for equal treatment when said equal treatment could mean his aft sitting in a cell under Iacon for the next few million years.

Of course, it would help if he could remember how they'd gotten there in the first place. He remembered someone saying that they were going back to Earth, and he remembered protesting the idea, and then he remembered waking up in the medbay and Ratchet being all, "Surprise! You're on Earth." Apparently, some Earth microbe had corrupted his memory files from the couple of days before that.

There were worse fates than being stuck on Earth with the Autobots, though (being stuck on Earth with the Decepticon high command, for instance; he and Breakdown had done long term scouting missions as often as possible for a reason). Knock Out and Team Prime had more or less settled any differences that they had during the couple of months before the first of the refugees had started showing up. Some had been easier than others, of course, but it was surprising how quickly you got over grudges when there were only seven of you against a whole planet of scraplets, insecticons, unstable architecture, unpredictable weather patterns, and the strangely barbaric tribe of former Autobots who had been hiding underground from Shockwave's slapdash regime for the last four million years.

No, the problem here on Earth was the humans.

Not humans as a whole. Knock Out had always been more okay with humans as a whole than Megatron had felt it appropriate that a Decepticon should. They were fascinating: they looked Cybertronian, acted Cybertronian, even told some of the same stories as Cybertronians (with slightly different names and circumstances, of course), but they were a completely different species made of completely different materials. How could anyone—besides Lord "Killjoy" Megatron— _not_ find that interesting?

As a matter of fact, Knock Out had thought that the one upside of possibly being shipped back to Earth was that he would finally get to enjoy it under a leader who didn't care if he went off and casually cavorted with the locals. Perhaps, he might even get that most coveted of Autobot rites of passage: a human companion.

And then they'd gotten here and the fat government guy had come out and said that Knock Out was never, ever under any circumstances, to go cavorting anywhere with anyone unless he had an Autobot escort on account of being a former criminal, or some such scrap. There was also a list of places he wasn't allowed to go and another of interactions he wasn't allowed to have because they were likely to give away his alien nature or otherwise unsettle people, which—naturally—included just about everything fun. (He was exceedingly surprised to see that "sexual interactions" was on the list because how would Fowler know that was even a possibility if at least one of the Autobots hadn't done it already?) All of which meant that the only humans he was allowed to spend time with were the ones that already hung around their base, and... Well, they were all either afraid of him, creepily eager to talk to him, or just generally did not like him.

The human children had been at the base even more than usual in the last two months because of something called summer break, and Knock Out had been spending as much time as possible in his and Ratchet's shared lab (he didn't even mind that Ratchet was in there). Unfortunately, the older medic had kicked him out tonight, saying that he couldn't deal with Knock Out's incessant chatter for another minute, so the redheaded mech found himself skulking back through the base toward his bedroom, hoping that he could make it there in peace.

That, of course, was too much to ask, but at least it was just Smokescreen who came jogging across the room toward him and not Jack or—Primus forbid—Miko.

"Hey! Hey, Knocks! Knocks, wait up!" the younger mech called after him.

"I stopped walking when you said the first 'hey,'" Knock Out pointed out.

Smokescreen waved the thought aside impatiently. "Are you going to hide in your room again?"

"I don't _hide_ in my room; I _relax_ there," Knock Out informed him indignantly. "Something utterly impossible to achieve while surrounded by screaming organic youths." He pointedly pronounced the word with a hard 'th,' the way that it should be.

Smokescreen glanced behind himself at Jack and Miko, who were splayed out on the couch with Bulkhead and Wheeljack. The only one who seemed to be awake was Miko, who was still running on Tokyo time. Knock Out recognized the flaw in his argument and straightened up.

"Did you need something?" he asked, actually making an effort not to sound too haughty for once. Of all the members of the base, he found Smokescreen the most tolerable, if only because he had taken the least shots at Knock Out over the last four million years.

"Yeah, we just picked up an unshielded Decepticon signal," Smokescreen told him, bright blue eyes lighting up even more than they already were. "You wanna come ID him for us?"

Knock Out looked now to Ratchet's system of monitors where Arcee was watching a human security feed. She looked vaguely concerned, but not enough for it be anyone ostensibly dangerous. Smokescreen looked like he thought it was someone interesting, though.

The medic heaved his best reluctant sigh and headed for the monitors.

"What paragon of evil is stirring up trouble on our pet planet tonight?" he drawled as he came up behind the femme.

"You tell me," she said, gesturing to the screen.

It was a grainy image of what looked like a train platform—the boring kind that was just a slab of concrete set alongside the train tracks. There weren't even any vending machines, though there was a random piece of installation art.

"Ugh, what is this place?" Knock Out demanded. "Siberia?"

"It's a town called Provo, Utah," Arcee told him, irritation creeping into her tone. "But ignore the architecture and tell us who _that_ is, please."

Knock Out pulled his eyes away from the godawful abstract statue and followed her finger to the large figure walking across the platform. The first thing of note was that the mech was a grounder, which narrowed the options considerably. He got closer and squinted a bit. It wasn't anyone he knew well, but he must have been on the _Nemesis_ at some point, or he wouldn't be on Earth now. After a moment, the mech turned slightly, and Knock Out pulled back with a noise of recognition.

"That's Topshift," he said. "Obnoxious as hell but barely above the Vehicons in terms of intelligence or combative capabilities. We can just leave him there and he'll probably get hit by a train for us."

He started to walk away and felt a hand clamp on the back of his shirt.

"Hey! This is hand-tailored!" he snapped, brushing Smokescreen off of himself.

"Why would you bother to tailor a t-shirt?" Arcee wondered.

Knock Out just rolled his eyes. Sometimes—very rarely, mind—he missed Starscream.

"Anyway, you can't just leave; we gotta go get him," Smokescreen pointed out.

" _I_ don't have to go get him," Knock Out protested, and then looked to Arcee. "Do I?"

"I thought you'd be excited," she said, a cheeky smile quirking her lips. "You're always complaining that we don't trust you enough."

"Yes, but it's..." he stopped to check his internal chronometer. "...11:20 PM. It's way too late to be going out on missions."

"You went to bed at 4 in the morning last night," Smokescreen pointed out.

"Exactly. I'm tired now," Knock Out said, yawning theatrically.

"And then you slept until 2:00 this afternoon."

"Yes, well..."

"And you only got up then because Ultra Magnus came in and dumped you out of the bed."

"Okay, fine! I'll go with you," Knock Out snapped.

"Sweet!" Smokescreen punched the air in triumph. "Can we stop and get more tabasco while we're out?"

"I thought we just restocked that."

"The focus is pulling in the Con, boys," Arcee reminded them.

"Yes, yes, we know," Knock Out waved at her impatiently. "We'll get your big baddy-daddy."

"I will pay you to never say that again," the femme muttered as she pulled the handle to the ground bridge.

* * *

There was nothing worse than Provo, UT in the summertime, Kitty had decided. At first, the prospect of spending a summer away from her parents' home in Murray had seemed exciting, like she was a real adult who did real adult things. She was only taking two classes for each of spring and summer terms, which would give her far more time to go out and have adventures with friends, and maybe some of those adventures might even being her into close quarters with an interesting young man of some sort or another.

However, like most young people before her, Kitty had quickly discovered that expectation and reality rarely aligned with one another.

For one thing, Provo was, first and foremost, a college town, and when Brigham Young University's winter semester ended in mid-April, it emptied out like a bathtub with a leaky plug. Everyone and anyone worth spending time with had gone home for the summer. Except for Kitty's roommate and best friend Sabrina, but Sabrina didn't count because she spent about 80% of the time that she wasn't asleep drawing yaoi manga in her bedroom.

For another, summer in Utah was hot. Very hot. Not as hot as Arizona summers, but still hotter than any sane person wanted to be hanging around outdoors in. Without a car for transportation, the prospect of leaving the apartment anytime that the sun was up was more than Kitty could handle on most days. The 30-minute walk to her classes or work left her red as a strawberry, covered in sweat, and in no condition to be scoping out young men.

Not that she wanted to pick up any of the boys who went to her school. Oh, they were alright as friends—she'd made one or two quite good friends among them, as a matter of fact—but for a relationship, she wanted someone less... _Mormon._

Sabrina had asked her back in senior year why she would choose a Mormon college when there were literally hundreds of other schools in the country with perfectly acceptable animation programs, and Kitty had just scoffed. It was one of those unspoken taboos that you didn't go to BYU if you weren't Mormon, so of course Kitty had to go there.

Plus, it was just so satisfying when she got in and Janessa Sorenson had to go to Utah State. That wiped the smug smile off her face for a while!

And Kitty had a good run of it for fall and winter semesters. Sure, she had to take at least one religion class per semester, and the whole dress code thing was a drag, and she didn't even want to _start_ on her political science class, but there were a lot of cool people and some of the things Mormons came up with to make up for the not drinking were pretty fun.

But...

Summer was not the same.

She rolled over on her bed with a groan and glanced at the clock. It was 1:27 on a Sunday night (technically Monday morning, now) and she'd done basically nothing but watch old mecha anime all weekend. No parties, no exploring shops on University Ave, no trips to Moab... Just pirated episodes of _Super Dimension Fortress Macross_ and a shift in the dish room on Saturday night. She had class at 10 the next morning, and had been trying to fall asleep for an hour now without success because she was just that bored.

With another groan, she heaved herself up off the bed.

Sabrina was still up, sitting cross-legged on one of the couches with her nose inches away from the page of her sketchbook.

"I can't sleep," Kitty announced as she let herself topple over the arm of the couch and fall heavily onto the cushions.

"Sleep is for weak people who don't drink caffeine," her friend replied without looking up.

"I don't really have to go to Doctrine and Covenants class tomorrow morning, right?" Kitty mused, turning her face out of the couch.

"I hate D&C. It's more sexist than the Old Testament and way less interesting. No one threw foreskins at each other in the 1800s. At least... not in Illinois and Ohio."

"Why can't a hot guy with a Valkyrie Fighter show up in _my_ life?" Kitty whined.

"You get car sick," Sabrina reminded her. "And air sick."

"I can dream!"

They lapsed into silence and Kitty started fishing the remote out from underneath herself. She turned on the TV and flicked through the channels until she hit the food network. There was a Chopped marathon going. Sabrina finally looked up from her sketchbook, face deadpan.

"This show is a travesty against all that is good in the world and it makes me want to throw up. Change the channel," she ordered.

"But it's the episode with the fried rice girl!" Kitty protested. "I love this episode!"

"They put Vietnamese coffee in the last basket. _Obviously_ she's gonna win," muttered her roommate.

"That's racist," Kitty muttered back as she changed to AMC, which was currently airing _The Happiest Millionnaire._

"The bar scene in this one is my favorite," Kitty commented, settling herself further into the couch.

* * *

"This is boring," Knock Out sighed as he cruised down one of the main streets of Provo. It seemed oddly empty for so late on a weekend.

"Agreed," Smokescreen came in from the other side of the comm link. He was patrolling somewhere on the other side of town. "Why are all the streets so straight, and where'd the pink bastard even go?"

"Well, I was referring to our tenure on Earth as a whole, but that too."

There was an understanding hum of static, and then, "I dunno. Earth is probably more interesting than Cybertron right now. I mean, only one of the Arks has come back so far, so it's not like there's a lot of quality company there either."

"Ugh. Why did it have to be Vigor's ark that came back first? It was like living inside one of those false utopia movies," Knock Out said with what would have been a shudder in bipedal mode. "How long do you think it'll be until we find the skeletons in the cargo hold?"

A sudden _ping_ brought both mechs back to the task at hand and they turned their attentions to their respective scanners.

"Is that..."

"Teleportation energy, yes," Knock Out confirmed, examining the little purple blip on his map.

"Do humans have teleporters?"

"Not unless they stole them from us."

"Does Topshift have a teleporter?"

"Well... I suppose stranger things have happened."

Smokescreen gave a low whistle. "Look at that: our evening just got a little more interesting!"

"I suppose that's one way to look at it," Knock Out sighed.

* * *

About a half-hour into the movie, an issue other than sleepiness started creeping up on Kitty.

"I'm hungry," she announced, pushing herself up from the couch.

Sabrina just kept drawing.

There was a note stuck to one of their two fridges in Kitty's own handwriting that read, "Stop eating at night, Kitty! You'll get fatter!" Kitty huffed a sigh of irritation through her nose before tugging it off and crumpling it up.

"Is there any ice cream left?" she called into the living room, even as she was opening the freezer to check.

"I finished it last night," Sabrina replied. There was a pause in which Kitty opened the second freezer, just in case, and then her roommate added, "If you're going to the store, get me some coffee."

"Oo, Sabs, you naughty girl! Coffee is against your religion," Kitty teased.

"So is drawing gay manga."

So was not being married by age 20, apparently, Kitty reflected as she closed the freezer and found herself once again faced by the barrage of wedding announcements from various friends and family. Most of them had already passed earlier in the summer, and had mostly been held in church gyms because the involved parties were too young to afford anything close to a fancy wedding. Logically, Kitty knew that the majority of the people she knew were still single, but it didn't feel that way when there weddings and engagements and neighbors kissing boys good night on the doorstep everywhere she turned.

Not that Kitty needed that, obviously. Her mother always said that a girl should spend plenty of time finding herself on her own before she worried about finding a boy to complicate things. It was just… something she couldn't help noticing.

"What kind of coffee do you want?" Kitty asked as she headed for her bedroom again.

"Get me a small with hazelnut syrup," Sabrina called after her.

Kitty paused in the doorway of her bedroom, searching the jumble of clothes on her floor for her bra. Somehow, the room had managed to become even more of a mess since their three other roommates had moved out for the summer and Sabrina had moved down the hall to the single room.

When a bra did not present itself quickly enough, Kitty grabbed a sweater off her dresser instead and threw it on over her pajama shirt.

"I don't wanna go all the way to 7/11," she said as she came back into the living room.

"It's only two blocks farther than Smith's," Sabrina protested.

"The ice cream is more expensive there, anyway," Kitty pointed out.

"Ew, don't get Western Family ice cream. That stuff is like frozen candle wax."

"I'll buy whatever I want," Kitty sniffed as she stepped out the door, though she wholeheartedly agreed.

* * *

"Alright, what do you see, Smokes?"

"If you'd get your bumper up here yourself, you might know," the younger mech countered.

"You know how I am around potential paint job disasters," Knock Out scoffed.

"Why are you just driving in circles?" Smokescreen demanded. "You know I can see you on the scanner, right?"

Knock Out paused before answering that. He was, technically, driving, but he was also doing so in a parking lot.

"Just staying limber," he finally answered. "Let me know if you need back up."

"Primus, you are such a..."

"Hey, you're the one who asked _me_ to come out on this gig," Knock Out reminded him, taking another turn around the almost empty parking lot. "I think this place is a football stadium. Why do they have a football stadium in a scraphole town like this?"

"Woah, really? I wonder what team it is."

"Don't know, don't care."

"Okay, so I'm at the spot where the teleport signal showed up on our radar, but I'm not seeing anything."

"Set your scanner to track the residual radiation," Knock Out suggested, spinning a doughnut just for the heck of it.

"Uh... how do I do that?"

Knock Out stopped driving.

"Seriously? Is this what passes for a member of the Elite Guard these days?" he demanded.

"Hey! They were mostly focusing on combat skills by the time I graduated," Smokescreen protested.

"Fine, fine," Knock Out sighed. "I'll come do it."

"Thank you for finding it in your infinite mercy to actually do some work."

"Well, I'm not coming if you're going to talk like that," the medic sniffed, but he was already pulling out of the parking lot. "You have to learn to speak with respect to your superiors."

Smokescreen just laughed.

"What? You don't think I'm your superior?"

"Knock Out, the only part of you that's superior to me is your ego," the younger mech replied.

"Oh, okay. So, you _didn't_ just ask me how to perform a very basic scanning operation that a any educated youngling could do in their—WOAH!"

He cut off abruptly as a pink Cadillac came bursting out of a side street, aiming straight for his side doors. Knock Out swerved, and the other car grazed his rear wheel well instead of t-boning him. The impact still sent him spinning up the road until he skidded to a halt about a hundred yards later.

"Kiss my aft, Knock Out!" the Cadillac called as it sped past.

"What's going on over there?" Smokescreen wanted to know.

"Oh, you know," Knock Out growled as he adjusted his side mirror to get a good view of the new dent. "Just someone's about to get his tailpipe smashed!"

"Wait for me!"

"No time," the Aston Martin growled, shifting into gear.

"Just remember; we're not supposed to transform in inhabited areas!"

But Knock Out was too busy to pay him attention anymore.

* * *

In the end, Kitty decided to be nice to Sabrina and went to the 7/11. True, that meant that she had to get Ben & Jerry's for $4.25 instead of the Kroger brand stuff for $2.19, but Kroger didn't have coffee heath bar flavor anyway.

Neither did the 7/11 as it turned out, and Kitty found herself staring in frustration at the somewhat depressingly small selection in the freezer for a good five minutes as she tried to decide on a substitute. The Linkin Park music blaring through the store speakers at unholy decibels wasn't helping things. In the end, she grabbed a pint of "phish food," got Sabrina's coffee, and headed for register.

The young man behind the counter was tall, broad-shouldered, and white, like just about every man in Provo.

"Evening, Steve," Kitty shouted over the music as she plunked the ice cream down on the counter. "What's with the volume tonight?"

"Manager's out of town," he grunted in explanation, ringing up her items and then looking up expectantly.

Kitty pulled her wallet out of her sweater pocket and flipped it open to find it devoid of debit cards. She frowned at the empty space as though it might manifest the missing rectangle of plastic if she intimidated it enough.

"Did you leave it at home again?" Steve asked.

Kitty shot him a look and started digging through her pockets.

"Ha!" she declared a moment later, brandishing the card at him. "Oh, ye of little faith!"

"I tend to have faith in pre-established patterns of events," the young man shrugged.

Kitty ignored him and slipped her card into the chip reader. When nothing happened, she leaned in closer and frowned at the reader.

"Just like I had faith that this would happen," Steve added.

Kitty realized that the card was in backward and flipped it around, taking care not to make eye contact with Steve.

"Congratulations," he announced.

"Shut up, Steve. _You_ still work graveyard shift in a convenience store," Kitty snapped.

"I have accepted my role in the universe as the faceless slave to others' midnight whims."

"Wow," Kitty said as she took her ice cream and coffee from the counter. "On that note, I'm heading home to eat ice cream and consider my own place in the universe, I suppose."

"See you again soon," Steve called after her as she headed for the door.

* * *

The streets in Utah were, for the most part, unusually wide and straight, but many of them had gutters that were about a foot deep and dropped off sheer on either side of the road and Topshift seemed determined to run Knock Out into one of them.

Paint now more than a little bit scratched, Knock Out pushed back as hard as he could, but was finding that an Aston Martin was not much match for a Cadillac in terms of horse power when both were sporting Cybertronian engines.

One of Knock Out's front tires finally went over the edge, and he finally gave up with a growl of frustration, flipping into bipedal mode before his own momentum could send him into a rolling collision with the random glass shed in the parking lot of the building next to him. He ran his back tires in reverse to bring himself to a halt faster and then took off sprinting after the Cadillac. Topshift didn't even make it around the corner before Knock Out slammed onto his overly pronounced hood.

The red mech flipped one of his hands around into a buzz saw and brought it down toward the surface of said hood. It was Topshift's turn to growl now as he swerved, trying his best to knock the medic off of him. Knock Out just dug the claws of his other hand into the seam where his hood met his windshield and hung on. A moment later, Topshift flipped into his own transformation sequence and the both of them tumbled into a small gas station.

Topshift skidded to a halt, and then turned around just in time to see Knock Out come sailing toward him. The garishly pink mech managed to avoid taking a buzz saw to the face, but the weapon dug into his shoulder instead. There was a moment of confusion in which Topshift howled in pain and thrashed a bit and Knock Out almost fell over trying to pull himself out of the other mech's shoulder, and then both of them paused as they realized simultaneously that he was very much stuck.

"Ah... Hey, Topshift," Knock Out started, a sheepish grin spreading across his face. "How've things been."

"Real great, Knock Out," the other mech replied through gritted teeth as he grabbed hold of the smaller mech's forearm.

"So, I know what you're probably thinking right now," Knock Out laughed nervously. "Something like, 'What would happen if I just kinda punched him in the face?' And, see, the thing with that is..."

Topshift punched him in the face.

The force finally pulled the saw free and sent Knock Out sailing backward several feet. He bounced a bit and finally came to a stop on his back at the other end of the lot. As soon as Topshift was done howling over the pain of having a buzz saw very suddenly ripped out of his shoulder, he went charging across the pavement after him.

Topshift had always been rather flashy, though, in both paint jobs and fighting styles, so rather than kicking his quarry while he was down or shooting him with a blaster or something sensible like that, the Cadillac took a flying leap in preparation for an elbow drop—WWE style.

As he reached the apex of his leap, Knock Out suddenly grabbed hold of a small, stout stick that had been clipped to his side and swung it upward. It extended into an energon prod, the end already crackling with charge, and Topshift, already in midair, had no way to avoid landing directly on it.

He went down, jerking and twitching, on the pavement beside Knock Out, who stood up to get a better angle before driving the prod into the armor of his neck. The smaller mech held it there for 30 seconds or so until confident he had done his job, and then released. Topshift remained slack on the ground before him.

Knock Out stepped aside from his opponent with a sigh of relief and looked around to get his bearings; he'd been too distracted while chasing Topshift to pay attention to exactly where he'd been going earlier.

It was then that he properly noticed the convenience store attached to the gas station and the human girl who was standing slack-jawed in front of it.


	3. Chapter 2

**CHAPTER TWO: In Which Kitty Meets Some Aliens**

Kitty blinked a couple of times, rubbed the backs of her hands against her eyes as vigorously as possible, and tried looking again. The robot men were still there.

"Uh... hi," the red one said, flashing her a charmingly uncertain grin and twirling the staff in his hand a bit. "Nice night for uh... to shoot a film, am I right?"

Kitty looked around at the gas station lot, devoid of any film crew, and then back to the stranger, eyebrows raised. If there was one thing she knew about this situation, it was that it most definitely was not a movie shoot.

In fact, speaking of movies, she realized that she actually recognized this; this was that moment in the superhero movies where the hero accidentally revealed himself to some random citizen and made up a lame, unbelievable excuse for his existence that made the audience laugh because it was so obvious he wasn't thinking straight, just before he disappeared into the night to be a hero somewhere else. Either that or they were _really_ convincing LARPers.

"So, anyway," the stranger was saying as he started tugging on his fallen opponent's arm, "we'll just be moving along to our next scene location now. You have a good night."

Well.

On the off chance that this was a superhero encounter and not a LARP interrupted, Kitty was not going to become "Gaping Citizen #43" in the credits of her own life. Only thing was to find some way to do it without becoming "Screaming, Whining Heroine Who Gets in Everyone's Way and We're Really Not Sure Why They Keep Her Around" instead. The whole situation was just so perfectly surreal and she needed some way to keep it in her life—some way to keep this gorgeous, mech suit-wearing stranger in her life...

"Can I be in it?" she asked, the words spilling out of her before she had time to register what she was actually saying.

The man dropped the pink-armored leg that he'd been pulling on and turned to her with his brow furrowed and lips pursed as though trying to decide which question word to begin his first sentence with.

"The movie, or whatever it is," Kitty clarified, feeling her face heat up. "I mean... You know what? Never mind. That was a stupid thing to say. Obviously, you're not _actually_ shooting a movie. I just thought maybe you're a superhero, or something, and it would be cool to know a superhero and…. Well, even if you're just LARPing, it looks pretty fun and I'd kind of like to try it out and—"

She was babbling now, and she knew it. Her exhaustion had caught up with her and turned off the filter between her brain and her mouth, and the pretty red robot man was still just staring at her like he was trying to figure out what species she was. If she didn't stop herself soon, she was going to say something really damning like, "God, you're super gorgeous," or...

Oh.

Oh, she actually had just said that. And he was blinking at her now, and she couldn't tell if the look was surprise or appraisal. Well, if she'd gone that far, she might as well see things through and take the plunge.

"Can I just, like, have your number or something?"

There was a brief silence, during which Kitty became painfully aware of the fact that she was wearing her pajama shorts, had bedhead, and was holding a cup of coffee and a pint of ice cream at 1:30 in the morning. Still, she squared her shoulders and held his gaze because "insecure" and "self-conscious" were luxuries that only tiny, beautiful girls could afford.

"Soooo, let me get this straight," the stranger finally said, twirling his staff again. "You walk out of a convenience store in the middle of the night to find two inexplicable metal beings pummeling each other, and your first instinct is to come on to one of them?"

Kitty didn't have an answer for that, but fortunately, it seemed to have been a rhetorical question anyway.

"Well, you certainly have impeccable taste for a human, if I do say so myself," he continued, cocking a hip to the side and resting his free hand on it in a manner that had Kitty instantly worried that she may have been barking up the wrong tree.

Before either of them could say anything else, though, the man on the ground revealed that he had not been unconscious after all by raising an arm—which was somehow now a gun—and firing it at the other man's back. The blast of blue energy caught him on the shoulder, sending him stumbling forward with a gasp and making him drop his staff. In the time it took for him to regain his balance, the man in the pink suit had jumped to his feet again and delivered a kick to his side. One thing was for sure, though: this was not a LARP.

Kitty was torn between making a run for it and pulling out her phone to film as she watched her apparent superhero roll across the parking lot and come up in a crouch, twin buzzsaws now where his hands had been moments before.

"Smokescreen, you'd better be right around the corner!" she heard him yell at no one in particular.

In the meantime, the pink mech took a look around, spotted Kitty, and started toward her. As she realized that there was a substantially imposing man in hot pink battle armor coming toward her with the most stereotypically malicious grin she'd ever seen plastered across his face, primal instinct took over and flung the contents of her right hand at her assailant. Luckily, this happened to be Sabrina's coffee. The mech was too close to react in time, and the scalding liquid hit him square in the face.

Kitty's legs took charge while he was howling and wiping frantically at his eyes. She had made it halfway across the parking lot when a blue and gold race car came squealing in through the entrance and cut across in front of her. Before she could get much farther than wondering why an actual race car with numbers and everything was zooming around Provo, the car flipped and started crumpling in on itself. Moments later, a third man in mech armor was skidding across the parking lot toward the pink one.

Kitty stopped running and stared in open-mouthed amazement as the newcomer and the pink one started trading shots. She now noticed the details that had blended into the overall effect of their armor before, like the car doors on the red one's arms and what was obviously a car hood of some kind making up the chest plate of the pink one's armor.

Naturally, she knew that she should be running away from the fight, but... _robot guys who turned into cars!_ She let out a slightly manic giggle, clapped her hand over her mouth, and then did it again. It felt like her emotions were temporarily broken.

And then she registered that the pink mech had taken advantage of a break in the fighting to aim his blaster in her direction.

"Say goodbye to your little human friend, Auto-boobs!" he cackled before letting the bolt of blue energy fly.

Kitty's fight or flight instinct was just starting to overcome her freeze reflex when something bright red and painfully solid came out of her peripheral and slammed into her side. There was an impression of a pair of arms wrapping around her waist before the world was shifting and turning with Kitty in the center. When everything stopped, she was sitting in the back seat of a car that her limited knowledge of vehicles could only describe as "expensive-looking."

"Ugh," she remarked, rubbing at her side where what she assumed had been the red mech had collided with her earlier. It was the best she could manage until her lungs finished re-inflating.

"Wow, didn't think I was gonna make that, to tell the truth," the red mech's voice drawled from somewhere near the dashboard. The steering wheel spun on its own as they rounded a corner out of the gas station. "Name's Knock Out, by the way, and I don't really have a phone number... Bit of a government secret, if you get my drift. Sure you want in on that?"

Kitty stole a glance out the back window where she could still see the other two mechs battling in front of the 7/11, and then settled back down in the seat, her breath just about returned.

"Email?" she gasped hopefully.

Knock Out's engine revved a bit, almost like he was laughing.

* * *

Smokescreen's first concern was getting the fight off the main street; he could just imagine the lecture that Ultra Magnus would give him if he and Knock Out were plastered all over the local news in the morning. It was going to be bad enough for involving a single innocent bystander.

So, as Knock Out sped off with their collateral damage in his backseat, Smokescreen fired his blasters at Topshift to hold his attention while running around toward the back of the building. There was a parking lot concealed behind several small businesses that should be ideal.

The Decepticon growled in frustration and followed him, firing a few shots of his own. Smokescreen ducked around the corner and waited just inside the lot until his opponent rounded the same corner moments later.

"Amateur," he scoffed, leveling his gun with the side of the Decepticon's head.

"Autodolt," the other mech replied, shoving Smokescreen's arm upward so that his blaster fired at the sky instead. He then grabbed Smokescreen's elbow and made to throw him, but the former elite guardsman was ready for him.

Smokescreen hooked a leg around the other mech's knee and yanked him off-balance. They both went down with Smokescreen on top, and the Autobot soon had Topshift on his stomach with one arm twisted behind his back.

"You wanna demechanize, buddy?" the young mech asked, pressing a charged blaster against the back of his captive's head.

"Autobot scum! First chance I get, I'm fragging your pretty little aft till you can never walk again!" Topshift snarled.

"Uh, ew," Smokescreen declared, giving the Decepticon's elbow a deft twist. There was a grinding of gears and Topshift howled with pain. "You wanna try that again while I'm asking nicely? Demechanize, please."

There was some grumbling and then the plates of Topshift's armor started shifting into themselves, shrinking and retracting back underneath his clothes once more.

"See? That wasn't so hard, now was it?"

Topshift grumbled something vaguely obscene in reply while Smokescreen unclipped a pair of stasis cuffs from his side and started pulling his prisoner's arms back into them. He was just finishing up when a pair of headlights flooded the compact lot and he looked up to see Knock Out rolling toward him.

"What'd you do with the human?" he asked as the Aston Martin came to a stop in front of him.

"Ah, about that..." Knock Out said, and one of his back doors popped open. Kitty climbed out, looking slightly dazed.

"Knock Out! You were supposed to get rid of her!" Smokescreen whined, getting to his feet. "You realize how hard Magnus is gonna ride our afts on this!? We'll be lucky if we get to leave the base again for, like, _six months!_ "

"Oh, please," Knock Out scoffed, flipping back into his bipedal mode. "Like we have enough manpower for any of us to be grounded right now."

"He'll find a way," Smokescreen promised him. "And if _he_ doesn't, _Fowler_ will, for sure!"

"Um... I mean... I promise I won't tell anyone about you, or anything, if that's what you're worried about," Kitty put in.

"I don't see what the big deal is," Knock Out said, waving her assurances aside. "Protecting humans is part of being an Autobot, isn't it?"

"Weak-sparked fraggers, the lot of you!" Topshift interjected.

"Oh, shut up," Knock Out snapped, pulling out his energon prod again and approaching his former comrade.

"Antagonizing prisoners is _not_ part of being an Autobot," Smokescreen reminded him, putting out an arm to stop his progress.

"He antagonized me first," Knock Out muttered.

"Megatron's gonna slag all of you when he gets here!" Topshift said, assuming a tone reminiscent of a four-year-old promising doom to an older sibling upon their parent's impending return.

"You're a bit late to the party, Tops," Knock Out scoffed. "The big M surrendered and renounced his wicked ways over a year ago. The war's over. Get used to the idea."

Topshift looked confused for a minute, and then he burst into manic laughter.

"Yeah, right!" he chortled. "He's still got loads of plans for us! Starscream was just telling me all about it."

"Wait. Wait, wait, wait," Smokescreen backtracked. "When exactly did this hypothetical conversation between yourself and Starscream take place?"

"Who gives a frag? It's all the little glitch ever talks about these days," Topshift growled back.

Knock Out and Smokescreen exchanged a glance for a moment, and then the both of them suddenly went spineless and started whining like younglings.

"Nooooo, please, Primus, no!" Knock Out groaned. " _Anything_ but Starscream!"

"I thought he got eaten by Predacons!" Smokescreen added.

"What? No. What the frag is a Predacon?" Topshift wanted to know.

"How did he get here?" Knock Out demanded, pushing the end of his prod up under the other Decepticon's chin.

"I dunno! Him and his brothers just showed up in—"

"NOOOOO!"

"Man, you are a _terrible_ Decepticon," Smokescreen remarked, nudging Topshift with his foot. "You just can't stop giving away intel, can you?"

"Not Thundercracker! I _cannot_ deal with Thundercracker!" Knock Out continued to whine.

"Oh, come on. He can't be any worse than Starscream… can he?" Smokescreen wondered.

"Oh, _Primus!_ He's like an Ultra Magnus you can't bring yourself to hate!"

"You do know that most of us don't hate... Never mind. What are we gonna do with the human?" Smokescreen asked, gesturing to the human girl who had been standing nervously to the side like she couldn't decide whether to join the conversation or sidle off into the shadows for the past couple minutes.

"Oh yeah. Hey, human! What's your name again?" Knock Out asked, beckoning her toward them.

The girl stepped forward, and Smokescreen reflected that Knock Out just may have found the most boring human possible to bring along as collateral damage. Then again, he supposed someone like Knock Out might prefer to be surrounded by boring people; they would offset his own ego and imagined greatness nicely.

"It's Kitty," she said, looking nervously between the lot of them.

Smokescreen was opening his mouth to ask her what on Earth she'd been doing out on the streets at 1:30 AM when Topshift decided to speak up again instead.

"Human scum! When the Decepticons rule this planet, your kind will be nothing more than slaves, and I'll make sure you get a front row seat as—" He trailed off with a gurgled grunting noise as Knock Out drove his energon prod into the back of his neck.

"Some people just don't know when to shut up," the Aston Martin sighed as he pulled away again.

"Am I in trouble?" Kitty wanted to know. "Like, am I gonna get whisked away to some government facility now and never be allowed to see my family and friends again?"

"Nah, your government is way less totalitarian than ours," Smokescreen assured her. Then, after some reflection, added: "Though maybe they're just nice to us because we could blow up their whole planet if we wanted…"

"Probably," Knock Out shrugged. "Anyway, you're lucky, Kitty. You found the _fun_ government conspiracy."

"If you call getting shot at and running for your life on a regular basis 'fun,'" Smokescreen muttered.

"Don't listen to him. We have lots of fun."

"Knock Out, we can't just bring humans back willy nilly," Smokescreen protested. "You think I wouldn't have gotten a human partner by now if we could?"

"Are you guys aliens?" Kitty cut in.

"Born and bred," Knock Out replied, pressing a splayed hand to his chest and giving a little bow.

"This is so cool…" the girl breathed.

"Hear that, Smokes? She thinks we're cool. Come on, let's just take her!"

"You don't even know if she _wants_ to go!" the younger mech pointed out.

"I'll get to come back again, right?" Kitty wanted to know.

"Yes, yes, you can see your family and friends and whatever else you want," Knock Out assured her impatiently.

"Then, yeah! I wanna come!" she said eagerly.

Smokescreen frowned, looking back and forth between his colleague and the human girl. If he were Arcee or Bulkhead or even Bumblebee, he might have stopped to consider the fact that bringing Kitty along with them to the base would uproot her entire life in ways that she couldn't possibly understand well enough to make an informed decision right now.

But Smokescreen was not older, and while he had gotten a lot more experience in the last year or so, he still was not prone to spending much time reflecting on the potential consequences of his actions. The main thought that went through his head while making his decision was that he kind of liked being the only one on their crew whose company Knock Out seemed to genuinely enjoy—the only one who had any kind of leverage with the ex-Con—and wouldn't going along with this right now cement that position a little more?

"Fine," he sighed after a moment. "We'll bring her back to base with us, but don't blame me if Ultra Magnus throws you in solitary for a month!"

"Knew you'd see my side of it in the end," Knock Out drawled, bringing a finger up to his comm. "Arcee? Yeah, we're ready for pick up, and we've got a little surprise."

* * *

As the lurid green light of the groundbridge faded out of the parking lot, throwing abandoned fast food wrappers and pernicious weeds back into shadow, a careful observer might have noticed the figure that unfolded itself on the roof of one of the small, square buildings that walled the lot. The observer may also have heard the quiet murmur of, "Well, scrap," from the figure, if they were listening carefully, but it would not have taken much careful observation at all to notice the flash of purple light that came from the rooftop a moment later, taking the figure with it.


	4. Chapter 3

**CHAPTER THREE: In Which Miko Finally Gets to Tell Her Stories**

In Miko's opinion, her teammates were all excessively weak-willed. Sure, she was running on Tokyo time, but even here, it was still barely half-past midnight. How could they all be asleep already? They had promised to join in her _Fist of the North Star_ marathon! She reached over and walloped the closest person (who happened to be Wheeljack) in the stomach with a disdainful huff to show her displeasure.

"Hm wha..!?" the Wrecker grunted, jerking awake.

"You're missing the best part!" she told him.

Wheeljack frowned and squinted at the screen, where an animated figure with intense eyebrows was howling and jabbing rapidly at a much larger animated figure with a mohawk.

"What are we watching again?" he asked.

Miko rolled her eyes and was about to tell him when Arcee's voice interrupted her.

"You _WHAT!?_ " the femme roared, and both Miko and Wheeljack jumped around in fear she might be addressing them for some reason. "No, don't bring her back to base! Just _deal_ with her somehow!" she continued, and they realized she was yelling at someone over the comms.

"How exactly do you expect us to 'deal' with her?" Knock Out's voice drawled back. "She's not some crazy conspiracy theorist we can just fob off with a load of scrap about joining the Earth Defense Force or whatever it was you told that maniac with the train."

"That's..." Arcee paused, working her jaw back and forth as she struggled with some great internal debate. "Okay, fine!" she finally conceded. "Bring her back here, but just so Fowler and the commander can debrief her! We are _not_ keeping another human around!"

Miko gasped and turned to Wheeljack, eyes wide with excitement.

"They caught another one!" she exclaimed in a high-pitched hiss.

"Sounds like," Wheeljack yawned. "I just hope they caught the Con, too."

The groundbridge whooshed open then, bathing the whole of their makeshift command center in lurid green, and Miko sat up on her knees, leaning over the back of the couch to see who would come through.

"Do you think maybe she'll be a super cool military person? Or another punk rocker?" she mused aloud.

A figure stepped out of the groundbridge and hesitated just at the entrance. Miko's excitement instantly evaporated. The girl was average in every single way imaginable: average height, averagely chubby, average brown hair, a totally nondescript face, and clothes that were more stains and frays than anything else.

"Or she could be a frumpy dumpling," the Japanese girl muttered, slumping down over the back of the couch.

"Maybe she cleans up nice," Wheeljack suggested, and Miko snorted in derision.

A moment later, three more figures appeared: Knock Out and Smokescreen with a strange mech slung between the two of them. The mech had a clamp over his mouth of the sort that Ratchet sometimes threatened Knock Out with if he didn't stop whining.

"Did anyone order a renegade Decepticon?" Smokescreen called out.

"Nice hair," Miko observed from the couch, taking in their latest capture's hot pink quaff.

Arcee shut down the groundbridge and went charging toward the returnees, murder flashing in her eyes.

"Would you two like to explain this a bit better?" she demanded, jabbing a finger at the human girl, who had yet to do much other than stand around looking awkward and confused.

Knock Out reeled back from her slightly before drawing his face into a scowl and planting a hand on his hip.

"I dunno. You wanna explain how you let a teenage boy _straddle you_ a couple years ago and get pulled into all this?" he returned.

"That has nothing to do with—"

"Oh, but don't forget about how then when you went to do damage control on the situation, you didn't even notice you were being followed by another human teenager until after you'd transformed right in front of her!"

"Knock Out, that's—"

" _And_ ," he continued loudly, looking smug, "your concept of 'damage control' was 'bring 'em back to base and let 'em storm the Decepticon warship with us?' I rest my case."

"That's exactly why we have protocols in place now to prevent this!" Arcee finally got out. "Smokescreen, you said you would keep him in check!"

"Well, I mean, I tried," the young mech mumbled, having the decency to look at least a little bit chagrined.

"Whatever. This is not midnight material," Arcee sighed, rubbing a weary hand across her forehead. "I'll just let Magnus deal with you two in the morning."

Miko couldn't help but giggle at the looks on the two mechs' faces at that threat.

"Wheeljack!" Arcee called, and the Wrecker heaved a sigh before hauling himself up off the couch.

"See to it that tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum make it safely to the cells?" he guessed as he made his way over.

"Hey!" Knock Out protested. "Don't call Smokescreen dumb."

"Yeah, I scored five points above non-sentient on the Ambus!" Smokescreen put in, and Miko honestly couldn't tell if he was joking or not. Either way, the pink-haired Con was looking very much as though he would like to choke himself on his own gag.

The human girl was still just standing there as they all headed toward the cells, tugging slightly at the hem of her booty shorts as if she could make them longer that way.

"What's your name, kid?" Arcee asked, turning to her now.

"Katherine, ma'am," the girl replied. "Katherine Jenkins. But most people call me Kitty."

"Awesome," the femme yawned. "Miko?"

"What?" Miko sat up as Kitty looked over and made direct eye contact with her, sincerely hoping that Arcee was not about to ask her to show the newcomer around the base or something. She had no intention of making friends with this girl; it would wreak havoc on her reputation if people saw her hanging around with a frump muffin like that.

"Let Kitty sleep in your room if you're not gonna use it tonight," Arcee continued.

Oh, that was so much worse than giving her a tour of the base.

Kitty was smiling at her, though, so Miko forced something back that wasn't quite a grimace. It could be worse, she reasoned. Jack could have brought home _Sierra_ or something, after all.

* * *

If Kitty had thought about it long enough, she supposed she might have come up with an abandoned warehouse as the base for a bunch of alien mecha people, but mostly she had expected something a bit more... impressive. A bustling hub of activity with shining white walls hovering somewhere in Earth's upper atmosphere wouldn't have been amiss. Nor would a stern-faced commander with impeccable hair and a long, billowing military coat.

She certainly hadn't expected the stacks of half-unpacked moving boxes in one corner, nor the lounge setup in another that looked like the den in her aunt's basement where she and her cousins used to play video games all summer—the one she was pretty sure hadn't been cleaned since she was in middle school. The couple of random helium balloons floating in the rafters were a surprise, too. Overall, the place was less like a secret base and more like a high tech crash pad.

Equally unexpected was when the angry-looking Hispanic woman with Pat Benatar hair dumped her on what looked to be a badly color-coordinated exhibition of Harajuku street fashion. Kitty smiled at the girl, of course, because she wanted to make a good impression on these people, but she was quite certain that they were in agreement on the general suckiness of the current status quo.

"So..." Kitty started as they headed through the door opposite the hallway that the others had disappeared into moments before. "What do you turn into?"

The other girl—Miko—looked at her like she was crazy for a split-second, and then comprehension seemed to dawn.

"Oh! What do I... Um... A truck," she said. "Yeah, like, a seriously massive truck with missile launchers on top. I basically carry this team, you know?"

Looking at the girl's scrawny limbs, Kitty found that unlikely, but was too tired to try challenging it at the moment.

"What is this team exactly, then?" she asked instead.

"Autobots," Miko replied. "What else would it be?"

Kitty just held her hands out in a, "How should I know?" gesture, and Miko's frown deepened.

"Did Smokescreen tell you _anything?_ " she demanded.

"Aliens, government conspiracy... Yeah, that's about it," the older girl listed off.

Miko's face suddenly split into a broad grin. "Well, you're in luck," she started. "Because you get to learn about it from the best of the best!"

* * *

The three mechs escorted Topshift down to the cell block beneath their base and left him stasis-cuffed to the wall before heading back down the hall to the room Ultra Magnus had designated as the prison office. It was a long, narrow room with a single computer, a printer, several wheelie chairs, and a long row of filing cabinets intended someday to hold documents in triplicate on every single Decepticon they managed to bring in. So far, that had amounted to five, including Topshift, three of which had been lone Vehicons.

"So," Wheeljack said, sinking down into one of the chairs. "A girl, huh? I had you pegged as a straight-up mech kinda guy, Knock Out."

"Please," the redhead scoffed, throwing himself into another chair with enough force to make it roll across the floor a ways, his legs sticking out straight as he spun. "I welcome all who wish to experience my bed. Well, not _all_ , but... You know what I mean."

"Woah, wait." Smokescreen had stopped in the doorway, his expression somewhere between curiosity and horror. "You're not talking about the new human, are you?"

"Who else would we be talking about?" Knock Out wanted to know, turning himself back around to blink innocently up at the younger mech.

Smokescreen just laughed. "Knock Out, you can't have sex with humans," he said with the air of one explaining something very basic to a sparkling.

"Yes, you can," Wheeljack put in nonchalantly as he booted up the computer.

"Oh, I _knew_ it!" Knock Out hissed, pumping the air triumphantly. " _You're_ the one! Fowler added that bit about not having relations with humans because of you, didn't he?"

"Nope, that was Bulkhead's fault. You don't think I'd be careless enough to get caught, do you?"

"You guys can't be serious!" Smokescreen's expression was all horror now. "Energon is toxic to humans! If you were... you know... Wouldn't it...?"

"Energon's not as bad for humans as Ratchet would like you to think," Wheeljack shrugged. "'Specially not once it's been filtered through our bodies."

"So, just to be clear, how many of you have secretly been taking up with humans whenever you need a fix?" the young mech asked, finally closing the door and taking a chair himself.

"Just me, Arcee, and Bulk as far as I know," Wheeljack shrugged. "No idea about Bee. He doesn't seem the type to talk about it if he was."

"If you're wondering about our side, it was pretty much everyone except Megatron and Starscream," Knock Out put in.

"Ugh! No! Why did you throw that out there!?" Smokescreen wailed, clamping his hands over his ears.

Knock Out just laughed. "Anyway, it has been _way_ too long, so..."

"You realize if you're gonna hook up with her you gotta make it something legit, don't you?" Wheeljack spoke up again.

"How's that?" Knock Out demanded, a small frown creasing his brow.

"Because she knows about us, and the commander knows about her. You can't just throw her away when you're done," the Wrecker explained.

"Is no one going to point out the other obvious reason you can't do that?" Smokescreen wanted to know.

"Do elaborate," Knock Out said flatly.

"I mean..." the young mech shifted uncomfortably in his chair. "The existence of the human race itself is barely over the Cybertronian age of consent. It's just... _weird_."

"When in Iacon, do as the Iaconians," Knock Out sniffed. "The human age of consent is 18, so that's what I'm going with."

"Plus," Smokescreen tried again, "you only just met—"

All three mechs fell silent and stiffened slightly at the sound of a knock on the door.

"Who is it?" Knock Out demanded.

"Miko," Wheeljack informed him, craning his neck so that he could see through the little window.

"What does she want? This is adults only time," Knock Out hissed. "No, don't let her...!"

But Wheeljack had already moved to open the door for the girl, who came prancing in and flopped down in the last remaining chair.

"Your human fell asleep on me, Smokescreen," she huffed, putting her feet up on the computer desk. Wheeljack pushed them aside as he sank back down into his own chair.

"Not _my_ human," Smokescreen told the girl, holding up his hands in protest.

"What? But Knock Out's not allowed to have a human!" Miko scoffed.

"Excuse me," the mech in question spoke up, eyes half-closed in disdain, "but I don't remember asking _your_ opinion on the matter."

"Ultra Magnus won't let you, either," the girl assured him. "He's not gonna give a human companion to an ex-Con."

"I think it's less the ex-Con part and more the _you_ part," Wheeljack put in.

"What's that supposed to mean?" Knock Out demanded.

"We were just talking about it," the Wrecker said, turning to the computer and punching in a password.

"Yeah, Knocks," Smokescreen ragged. "You can't go getting a human if you're just gonna..."

He trailed off when Knock Out glanced pointedly at Miko.

"Gonna what?" she wanted to know. "You planning on bumping her off, or something?"

"What? No! Don't be stupid," the redhead protested.

"Ah, frag," Wheeljack groaned from the computer. "It's doing that thing again!"

The other three looked over to see that the computer screen had gone mostly black with strange, purple lights flashing across it, as it had almost every time they'd booted it up to log information on captured Decepticons.

"I thought Raf fixed that," Smokescreen yawned.

"Yeah, like, four times already," Miko agreed.

"Well, apparently not," Wheeljack grumbled, turning the computer off again.

"Great," Knock Out griped. "Now Magnus is gonna make us wait until it's fixed again until we can ask the idiot where Starscream is. Of course, we _could_ just use the other computer, but no! It _has_ to be this one, doesn't it? Freaking, neurotic—"

"What about Starscream?" Miko interrupted.

"He's on Earth again for some reason," Knock Out told her absently.

The girl instantly started kicking her legs and making high-pitched noises of excitement. "We get to catch Screamy!" she squealed.

"Yeah, if we can find him," Wheeljack muttered, frowning at the malfunctioning computer.

"Welp," Knock Out declared, slapping his hands down on his knees and pushing himself out of the chair. "If that's that, then I'm heading to bed. This has been a fascinating evening."

"Just make sure it doesn't become an _unfastening_ one," Wheeljack muttered, and Smokescreen sniggered while Miko shot a curious look between all of them.

"Would you look at that; it does tricks," Knock Out returned before sweeping out the open door.

He had a long walk up to his bedroom, and a lot to think over on the way—the human girl, for instance. Usually, Knock Out avoided getting into things with femmes (or women, or girls, or whatever Kitty counted as) because they tended to be so much less okay with the occasional casual frag, no strings attached. Even when they said it was fine, most of them were liable to turn around a few weeks or months later and start asking difficult questions, like, "Who was that mech that was railing you through the wall at so-and-so's house last night?"

However, Knock Out hadn't had a booty call in ages, and Kitty seemed willing enough, even if she was subpar on the looks spectrum. He would take what he could get. At least she had some meat on her. There was nothing so dissatisfying as getting into it with someone who was nothing but bones.

Speaking of which...

There was also the matter of not only Starscream but also Skywarp and Thundercracker apparently being on Earth. Knock Out wasn't sure how he felt about that. On the one hand, he definitely didn't want to run into Starscream after the way they had parted back on Cybertron, and Thundercracker could go eat human food for all he cared. Skywarp on the other hand, was probably the closest thing Knock Out had left to a friend.

Or, at least, he had been when he and Thundercracker had stolen a ship out of the _Nemesis's_ hangar and taken off into the stars about a century ago. (Knock Out could still remember the fight Megatron and Starscream had after that one, and the five hours he'd spent painstakingly piecing the Air Commander's cheek bone back together afterward.) He had no room to blame them for leaving anymore, but also wasn't sure what they would think of the particular manner in which he himself had abandoned the cause.

Still, Knock Out reflected as he finally slipped into his bed, as much as he was getting used to his new team, it would be nice to have some company on this planet that wasn't Autobot, whether that be a new friend or an old one.

* * *

Somewhere deep in the Canadian wilderness, something had cut a long swathe through the thick pine forest, although the broken trees had already to gathered a healthy coating of moss and fungi, and the deep furrow in the forest floor was covered in grass and other small vegetation once more. Whatever had caused the destruction had done so a good while ago and with no notice from anyone. At the deepest end of the furrow, surrounded by several piles of uprooted trees, sat an oddly-shaped bluff, about 12 feet high, with a hole in its side.

A young man with vibrantly purple hair was perched atop the bluff, his legs dangling lazily over its edge. He wasn't especially tall, but his long, stringy build gave an impression of greater height than he had. His face was narrow and angular, but with a boyish innocence to it that let him get away with just about anything.

At the moment, he was singing softly as he tapped away on several screens projected into the air beside him by a small device sat in the grass.

" _Oh, I once took a lover in Praxis, a well-to-do mech was he_ ," he sang. " _But his nose stuck out six inches, and his spike was only three..._ "

He paused and squinted at something on the screen for a minute before swiping it aside so that it fizzled out of existence. Then he turned to his other side, where a shotgun was lying in the grass.

" _He left in a tiff one evening, 'cause when we were playing in bed,_ " the young man picked up the song again as he loaded and cocked the gun. " _I told him I'd overload harder, if he'd just use his fingers instead!_ "

He got to his feet, the shotgun resting on his shoulder as he scanned the slowly lightening sky, and broke into the chorus:

" _Wealth, fame, and beauty from Vos to Crystal City..._ "

A flock of geese came into view over the tree line opposite him, and the man whipped the gun forward and pulled the trigger so quickly the motion was almost imperceptible. One of the geese plummeted to the ground, its head missing. The young man re-cocked his weapon by spinning it with a flick of his wrist and then shot a second goose down before the flock could make it out of the clearing.

 _"But those rowdy mechs in Kaon are the only ones who please me!_ " he finished the song with a grin.

Another man came limping out of the hole in the side of the bluff, then, this one several inches shorter than the first and dressed in pajamas several sizes too big. He had the same narrow sort of face as the other man, but without any of that boyish innocence, and it was fixed in an irritated scowl.

"Skywarp!" he bellowed up at the younger man. "What the _frag_ is all that noise about!? Are you trying to bring every human in the area down on our heads!?"

"There _are_ no humans in the area, Starscream," Skywarp replied, rolling his eyes as he lowered his gun.

"You don't know that! Humans crop up _everywhere_ on this dirt ball!" his brother shrieked.

"Yes, and they're _sooo_ evil and scary even if they don't look it," Skywarp mocked him. "You've only told me five million times already. Go back to bed."

"Why aren't _you_ in bed?" Starscream demanded. "It's three in the morning!"

"Me 'n Topshift went down to some human town where he said there'd be racing or something," the younger Seeker explained sitting back down and pushing himself off the bluff to land a few feet from his brother. "It was a bust in the end, but I got this. The guy was using one in that movie you didn't wanna watch with us the other night."

He held out the gun for inspection. Starscream was too busy gaping at him in horror to even look at it.

" _You went into a human city!? Alone!?_ " he eventually managed to shriek. "What would you have done if the Autobots found you!?"

"Uh, well, they _did_ find us," Skywarp told him, folding his arms and letting the gun dangle from one hand. "Or at least they found Topshift 'cause he's an idiot. Now I gotta find a new frag buddy..."

" _WHAT!?_ "

"Oh, I thought you knew I was banging him."

"Skywarp, I generally assume you're banging _anyone_ who isn't otherwise engaged!" Starscream snapped, massaging his temples. "I meant _what do you mean the Autobots found him!?_ "

"Knock Out showed up and Topshift just couldn't resist ramming into him," Skywarp scoffed. "He got taken out by some blue and gold loser and dragged off into a ground bridge."

Starscream stared at his brother for a second and then turned away, throwing his hands in the air with a scream of frustration.

"I HATE THIS FRAGGING PLANET!" he howled into the pink and gold sky.

"Well, it doesn't seem so fond of you, either," the other Seeker muttered, starting to examine his gun again.

His brother whirled back around and made as if to snatch it from his hands, but Skywarp jerked it away before he could. The two of them glared at each other for a moment.

"Give me that thing!" Starscream shrieked, diving for it.

"No, it's mine!" Skywarp whined, holding it up over his head. His brother collided with him, and the two of them toppled over.

"It's a stupid, dirty human product, and I forbid you to use it!" Starscream grunted, attempting crawl his way toward the hand Skywarp was holding the gun in. His progress was impeded by the fact that his left hip wouldn't seem to move properly. The younger Seeker planted his hand on his brother's face to push him away, but quickly pulled it back a second later with a cry of disgust.

"Did you just _lick_ me!?" he demanded.

Starscream took advantage of his distraction to make it the last little bit necessary to reach over and grab hold of the shotgun barrel, but Skywarp wasn't giving up so easily. He clung onto it for dear life, even as Starscream dug his heels into his little brother's chest and started trying to lever it out of his hands.

"What are you doing?"

Both Seekers looked up to see their third brother towering over them. Thundercracker was taller and broader than either of them, but the family resemblance was still there in the angle of his crimson eyes and the shape of his nose.

"He's trying to take my human gun!" Skywarp whined at him.

"He shouldn't have it in the first place!" Starscream grunted, still trying to pry his little brother's fingers off of it.

Thundercracker just sighed and reached down to grab hold of Starscream's ear. He pulled on it and the smaller Seeker let go of the gun, squealing in pain as he swatted at his other brother. Skywarp quickly scrambled out of his reach, and Thundercracker let go.

"I am your older brother _and_ your commander!" Starscream howled at the both of them as he stumbled to his feet. "Where's your sense of respect!?"

"Oh, I dunno," Thundercracker shrugged. "Maybe in the same place as your sense gratitude for us saving your sorry aft from slagging Predacons last year."

"I still say we shouldn't have saved him," Skywarp muttered, inspecting his gun for damage. "Getting eaten by creatures that aren't even supposed to exist would've been a fitting death for him."

"Warp!" Thundercracker scolded. "We don't let our brother get eaten by prehistoric beasts, even if he is an insufferable brat."

"I hate both of you," Starscream declared.

"Nobody cares!" Skywarp spat back.

"Hey, guys?"

The three Seekers turned as one back to the entrance of the ship, where a beefy mech with a distinct lack of hair was hovering awkwardly.

"What do you want, Thrust!?" Starscream snapped at him.

"Was just gonna ask if Topshift's back yet. I think he took my wallet," the Conehead muttered.

"Then you're not getting it back!" the former Air Commander snarled. "The idiot got himself captured by Autobots!"

"I've got it right here," Skywarp sighed, pulling the wallet from his back pocket and tossing it over. "The ATM says your account is running low."

Thrust caught it and heaved a sigh. "Fraggit, man... I should've stayed in New Orleans. You guys just mooch all my money and argue all day."

"Then you would've missed the glorious renaissance of the Decepticon army!" Starscream told him. "Any day now, our Lord Megatron will be back for us with countless reinforcements, and—"

"Ugh, just give it a rest, Star!" Skywarp groaned, rolling his eyes. "You've been saying that for the last year and _nothing's_ changed! He left you—he left _all_ of us! Get over it!"

Starscream turned to him, his eyes wide and his whole body shaking with fury, and Skywarp was half expecting to be shot in the face for a second. But then his brother just whipped back around and limped his way back into the hillside as fast as he could.

"Warp..." Thundercracker groaned, rubbing a hand over his face.

"What?" the youngest Seeker demanded. "Someone had to say it eventually!"

"I'm going to bed..." Thrust sighed, following after Starscream.

"We agreed when we first left the _Nemesis_ that we were done worrying about him," Skywarp hissed when he had gone. "And now what are we doing? Sitting in the middle of nowhere _worrying about Starscream!_ Thrust is right; we should just leave him here to rust and go down to New Orleans. Wherever that is."

"It's tempting, I know," Thundercracker conceded, "But—"

"He's still our brother," Skywarp finished. "Yeah, trust me; I'm well aware."

The smaller Seeker pulled a few more shotgun rounds from his pocket and slid them into place before turning away from Thundercracker and taking aim at a large branch on a distant tree. The round blew a hole through the spot where the branch met the tree, and the whole thing came crashing to the ground in a satisfying shower of pine needles.

Frag, but sometimes he wished Megatron _would_ try to show his stupid face around here.


	5. Chapter 4

**CHAPTER 4: In Which Several People are Confused**

Perhaps the most surreal part of the whole alien encounter experience for Kitty was waking up in Miko's bedroom the next morning. She knew consciously that she was in a secret alien base, but that was difficult to reconcile with the bookshelf full of old _Shonen Jump_ issues and the indie scream-o band posters covering the walls.

At least, Kitty assumed they were indie scream-o bands. They all had scream-o band makeup and she'd never heard of them, but who knew what counted as indie in the world of Asia and Eastern European scream-o? And really, what did any of that matter in the face of the fact that an alien had a fondness for shonen manga and obscure Earth music?

Kitty reached for her phone to check the time. 8:34. Her weird, Mormon scripture class started in less than half an hour, and she was still in the secret alien base.

She was _in a secret alien base_.

Kitty kept repeating the sentiment to herself, thinking that it ought to bring out more of a reaction than it did. When people in books and movies got into situations like this, they usually panicked or got super excited, but mostly Kitty just felt… _abashed_. Okay, so there was a little bit of excitement, but it was overshadowed by the memory of the fact that last night she had blatantly hit on a guy who was clearly older, much better looking, and far more of an alien than she was, and then she had followed him home to his _secret alien base_.

Why had she done this? What had she expected to happen? Did she think that they were going to swear her in as the newest member of their team and it would be all starbeams and quipping and blasting evil aliens with ray guns from here on out? She was an animator! What skills did she have that would possibly be useful to a bunch of shape-shifting androids from outerspace!?

God, that sounded like the title of some 1960s horror movie—the kind that ended up on MST3K.

Autobots, she remembered suddenly. The aliens were called Autobots, and they came from the planet Cybertron. That much at least she had managed to pick out of Miko's ramblings before her exhaustion had finally overtaken her last night. Maybe she would have gotten more information if the other girl hadn't insisted on constantly bringing new characters and concepts into her stories without properly introducing any of them. The main takeaway Kitty had grasped was that these guys led an intense and action-packed life. And, yes, Kitty did better than most at the shooting range, but that didn't mean she was ready for active combat of any sort!

She probably wouldn't even get the satisfaction of being able to brag to her brothers about this because the fact that there were aliens working with the government to round up other aliens had to be a massive national secret that she could get thrown in jail for spilling the beans on. The next time Roger announced that he was going on a super cool trip to Europe or Asia, she wouldn't even be able to retort with, "Yeah? Are you going to meet any alien robot people while you're there?"

Kitty sighed and clicked her phone on again, thinking that she should probably offer Sabrina some explanation for why she hadn't come home the previous evening, only to realize that she had no service. Well, didn't that just bite? She rolled up off the bed and headed for the window instead.

Miko's room was on the third floor of whatever this facility was, giving Kitty a remarkable view of the vast green plain sweeping away beneath her to meet rugged, purple mountains in the distance. They were snowier than Utah mountains would be at this time of year, and the vegetation was an awful lot more lush than the rabbitbrush and buffaloberry bushes that populated most plains where she came from. Kitty frowned as it occurred to her that she literally had no idea where on Earth she was. This could be Russia for all she knew!

More importantly at the moment, though, she also had no idea where the bathroom was, and her bladder was getting rather insistent that she find out.

Kitty turned away from the window and crept cautiously to the door. It wasn't locked, and no alarms went off when she finally got up the courage to turn the knob. There weren't any guards in the hallway outside, either, but Kitty couldn't quite bring herself to step out and start wandering around. There was bound to be some kind of repercussion for walking around the base on her own. She was liable to stumble into some meeting that she wasn't supposed to overhear, or accidentally walk into a lab and get zapped by some mystery ray that gave her superhuman strength or the power to make force fields, or…

On second thought, no one ever accomplished anything without taking a few risks in life, Kitty reasoned, taking a tentative step out the door.

The base had a certain hush to it, and the whole place put her rather in mind of her father's office building on a Saturday. The floor was carpeted in that gray, office building sort of wool carpeting, and the lights on the ceiling were the classic, long fluorescent type. The windows along the far wall looked out into a courtyard where she saw someone had set up a small basketball court, and the other side of the hall had doors identical to the one she had just come out of. Most of them just had numbers like regular offices, but she passed one after a while with a handwritten sign taped to it, bearing the legend: "RAF'S ROOM."

She turned the corner, and a pair of signs sticking out from the wall about halfway down announced her goal. When she got closer, though, Kitty found that the MEN and WOMEN signs had been replaced with HUMAN and CYBERTRONIAN respectively. Well, okay, then. Men's room it was.

After taking care of business, Kitty took a minute to examine herself in the mirror. She was sincerely regretting her decision to throw on a sweater instead of grabbing a bra before leaving her apartment now. She knew many women who would sing the praises of not wearing a bra until kingdom came, but personally, she just felt sticky, sweaty, and exposed without it. Her hair had reached new levels of disheveled while she was asleep, and Kitty spend a minute or two releasing it from its already half-destroyed bun and trying to finger comb it into something decent before giving the matter up as a lost cause.

She took a selfie with the urinals before leaving.

"...don't see how it's any of your business in the first place, Smokescreen."

"Because it's half my fault she got dragged into all this! She's my responsibility, too."

The sound of voices came drifting from somewhere down the hall, and Kitty froze, trying to decide whether she should duck back into the bathroom or try to make a run for Miko's room. Before she could make her decision, two figures rounded the corner just beside her and pulled up short.

It took her a second to realize that they were the same two aliens she had first met last night, but without their armor. If she hadn't watched them transform into cars and back the previous evening, she wouldn't have even thought to suspect that they weren't human.

Kitty felt a furious blush start to creep over her face as she made eye contact with the redheaded one—Knock Out. And how aptly named he was. Somehow, he had transformed overnight from a mech-suited warrior to a walking fashion ad; a little on the short side, but Kitty had always preferred not having to crane her neck to talk to a guy. He took one look at her and his face split into a broad grin, revealing a set of perfect, gleaming teeth.

"Well, hello," he drawled. "Sleep well, did we?"

Kitty folded her arms self-consciously across her chest and willed her thighs to be less flabby. She had dug herself this grave, and now it was time to lie in it.

"I mean, well enough for someone who got kidnapped and locked in a secret government base," she shrugged.

"We didn't—" the taller mech started, looking slightly affronted.

"Shush, Smokescreen. She's quipping," Knock Out cut him off with a flap of his hand. "Anyway, _I_ came up here to see if you might be interested in breakfast, and _this guy_ followed because he thought I was going to vivisect you in your sleep."

"Well, I thought you we going to do _something_ to her in her sleep," Smokescreen muttered, and Kitty found herself suddenly staring at his hair because _what_ was going on with that? It was mostly cobalt blue except for two gold streaks that almost seemed to hover over the rest of it like antennae. Although… he _was_ an alien; maybe they _were_ antennae?

"So, breakfast?" Knock Out spoke again, and Kitty pulled her gaze back to him.

"Yeah, that'd be good," she confessed. "As long as… Do you have human food?"

"I'm sure we can rustle something up. Shall we?" he swept aside with a gracious gesture for her to go first, that perfect, slightly crooked smile still flashing at her.

Kitty fidgeted with the hem of her shorts before squaring her shoulders and stepping forward with a smile of her own. Braless and bedheaded she may be, but her mother had always taught her that confidence was the key to such situations. If it was confidence she needed, then it was confidence that she would ooze.

* * *

Ratchet hadn't bothered to read the memo that Ultra Magnus had sent out that morning. It was marked "URGENT", but most of the commander's memos were, and most of them were about which filing cabinets they were allowed to put certain documents in. As both the chief medic _and_ mechanic of this backwater busywork operation, Ratchet had better things to think about. Like the unidentified transmissions that kept slipping through their firewalls.

About once a week since they'd moved into the new base, they received a series of garbled, nonsensical transmissions… with no sender. Normally, Ratchet would chalk this one up to faulty human technology and let Rafael deal with it, but he had a suspicion that Rafael knowing about the transmissions would lead to Miko knowing about the transmissions, and the younger members of their little group were already spreading rumors about a ghost sharing their living space. Doubtless, they would blame the transmissions on the lingering spirits of the dissatisfied Cold War veterans who still roamed the abandoned Air Force base, or, better yet, an ancient Indian burial ground deep beneath the tundra. Well, the joke was on them because this was Alaska, and Ratchet had it on good authority that the natives sent their dead out to sea on ice blocks around here.

Or was that in Greenland?

Either way, humans didn't have sparks, so what exactly did they think was going to linger? No, these were not some kind of supernatural transmission, they were just a ghost in the system. And yes, he realized how that sounded, but it was a human term that had nothing to do with actual ghosts. Even if the transmissions' origin point was coming up as 50 feet directly below their base.

Ratchet scowled at the results for the fifth time that morning, and resisted the urge to go Bulkhead on his computer. At least he was coming up with _any_ kind of origin for the transmissions this time, even if it made no sense. He'd already scanned the tundra below them, and there was nothing there. At this point, it would be best to ask Optimus for his insight on the matter.

His _dead_ insight, Ratchet forced himself to remember.

Voices approached the lab—neither of whose owners Ratchet was in the mood to deal with—and the medic started closing down his project for the time being. He was just collecting his half-consumed cup of morning energon and preparing to escape back to his quarters when the lab door swung open. In waltzed Knock Out with Smokescreen close on his heels and…

"What is _that?_ " Ratchet demanded, jabbing a finger at the grubby, unfamiliar human girl who had traipsed in with his unwanted lab partner.

"She's not a what, Ratch, she's a _who_ ," Knock Out was suspiciously read to defend the newcomer. "Kitty, this is Ratchet, our chief medical officer. On Earth, at least. I was the chief medical officer back on Cybertron."

"You were the _only_ medical officer on Cybertron," Ratchet reminded him.

"Nice to meet you, Ratchet," the girl greeted him cheerily. "I'm Kitty."

"What are you doing here?" the medic demanded. "Are you from the village? Did these two drag you here? What have they been telling you?"

"Relax, Doc," Smokescreen cut in as Kitty started to open her mouth. "Didn't you get the memo?"

Ratchet narrowed his eyes at the girl while he pulled up the ignored memo in his inbox and scanned through it. She stared back at him defiantly. Not the way that Miko did, like she was trying to challenge him to a fight, but more like she cared very deeply that the rest of the world was aware of how much she didn't care what they thought.

"Ah," the doctor remarked after a moment of scanning. "Collateral damage. Great. Like we didn't have enough of those running around already."

"Don't mind him, Kitty. He's old and bitter and doesn't want anyone to know how much he secretly loves humans," Knock Out told the girl, steering her toward the back of the lab. "Now, if you come over _here_ , you can see my workspace where I execute miracles of science on a daily basis…"

Smokescreen let them wander off, and Ratchet glared in his direction, hoping it would cue the young mech in to just how much he did not want to talk to him right now, but to no avail. The former Elite Guardsman completely missed the hint and sidled on over to him anyway.

"Me and Arcee thought it would be good if I brought him out with me last night. You know, to help him feel more included," he told the doctor in a low voice. "And now this is happening."

"Fowler's gonna crap kittens," Ratchet muttered back, taking a long sip of energon.

"I don't care what _he_ does," the younger mech scoffed. "I'm more concerned about what Ultra Magnus is gonna do to us. And what Knock Out's gonna do to _her_."

"Oh, I doubt he'll do anything worse than talk her ears off," the doctor shrugged, watching his colleague explaining his ion microscope to the human with a level of animation Ratchet hadn't seen from him in months. "Not before Magnus puts you both in solitary for a week and sends her home."

"I'll be surprised if he doesn't send _Knock Out_ home," Smokescreen huffed.  
"He's only doing this because he doesn't wanna be here in the first place."

"Probably," Ratchet agreed, though he highly doubted their commander was going to send Knock Out anywhere unless he went back to exhibiting actual criminal behavior. It would be too risky for everyone involved. "I think he's gonna be a bit preoccupied with the other half of this memo for a while, though."

"Ugh, yes," Smokescreen groaned, kneading his knuckles into his forehead. "Starscream times three… Have you met the other two before?"

"Anyone who fought on the frontlines has at least crossed paths with them," Ratchet grunted, swilling the energon in his cup. "Course, I ran into all three of them at various points before the war, too."

"What for?" the younger mech wondered.

"They're soldiers and I'm a medic," Ratchet explained.

"Yeah, but… Why wouldn't they go to a Decepticon medic?"

Ratchet rolled his eyes and didn't bother answering that one. For a mech who'd been Alpha Trion's bodyguard for several millennia, Smokescreen had a depressingly limited understanding of Cybertronian history.

Instead, Ratchet turned his attention back to Knock Out and the new human, whom the other medic was now apparently explaining energon crystals to. She looked utterly useless in every way, but then so had the other three.

Not that it was likely to matter since Optimus wasn't around to insist she needed protection from Decepticon attack. Fowler would have her back through the ground bridge with a gag order the size of the Benzene Cluster by the end of the day, and then Ratchet would have to deal with Knock Out's sulking for the next week or two. Especially if they were about to have to round up The Elite Trine.

"What I don't get," Smokescreen spoke up again, "is that Topshift guy said Starscream and his brothers landed here about a year ago, so not long after we restored Cybertron."

"Fascinating," Ratchet muttered, gulping some more of his fuel.

"And in all that time, they haven't done _anything_ ," the other mech continued. "Like, we've been scanning the Decepticon radio channels this whole time, and no one's mentioned them _at all_ until we got Topshift last night. It's like they're just hiding somewhere, minding their own business for once."

"What's your point?" the medic grumbled.

"I dunno. It just doesn't seem very… Decepticon, you know?" Smokescreen shrugged.

"Sounds about right to me, considering," Ratchet muttered.

"Considering what?" the young mech wondered.

One of Ratchet's eyebrows went up. It was such a chore talking to the armistice generations sometimes.

"Do you know what the number one reasons Decepticons stop being Decepticons is?" he asked, getting to his feet.

"They met the high command in person for the first time?" Smokescreen guessed.

Ratchet rolled his eyes.

"It's _grief_ , dummy," he snapped. "Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go interrupt the conniption our commander is doubtless working himself into."

* * *

After a couple hours of concerted effort, Thundercracker accepted that he wasn't going to get any sleep today (like most days lately), and hauled himself up out of bed. The bunk below his was empty, the blankets still in the same arrangement Starscream had thrown them into when he'd gotten up to investigate the shotgun noises several hours earlier. Thundercracker pulled on a pair of pants and stumbled, yawning, into the hall to see where his older brother had wandered off to.

It didn't take long—this time. Starscream was just down the hall in the kitchen, seated at a table that was littered with containers of electronic parts.

"Whatcha doin', Star?" the blue-haired Seeker asked as he slipped into another chair.

"I'm busy," his brother told him, tossing aside the power adapter he'd been trying to add to the creation in front of him and picking a different one out of a bucket on the table.

"Is that the distress beacon?" Thundercracker asked, getting a better look at the half-disassembled device.

He and Skywarp had set it up, despite their own status as traitors to the cause, after their chaotic escape from the Predacons had ended with the three of them crashed on an alien planet and Starscream in desperate need of medical care. It had gotten them Topshift, Thrust, and a suspicious amount of medical supplies for two rogue Decepticons claiming there were no major Cybertronian outposts on this planet. But the Seekers hadn't questioned it because those supplies were the only reason Starscream had survived… mostly.

"I'm boosting it," Starscream explained. "There have to be some loyal Decepticons left _somewhere_."

Thundercracker watched the other Seeker's slender fingers flit back and forth over the array of bins for several minutes before he reached into one of them himself.

"Looking for these?" he asked, offering out a couple of screws the right size to attach the adapter. Starscream plucked them out of his hand wordlessly and spent a minute or two trying to screw them in with his fingers until his brother pressed a screwdriver into his hand.

"You know, if there are Autobots on Earth again, don't you think it would be better _not_ to make a stronger signal for them to find us by?" Thundercracker pointed out.

Starscream's hands halted for a second, and then continued their frenzied mission as if nothing had happened.

"Starscream?"

"I'm trying to focus."

"I know you're focusing, but are you _thinking?_ "

The former Air Commander's eyes snapped up for the briefest moment. "Are you?" he sneered. "I could have you brigged for that kind of disrespect, Dreadwing."

Thundercracker closed his eyes for a minute and took a deep breath. So, it was going to be one of these days.

"My apologies, Commander Starscream," he said, trying to remember Dreadwing's speech patterns. "I should not have questioned your plans before hearing them through."

"You shouldn't _ever_ question my plans," Starscream muttered, rifling through a collection of wire coils before snatching one that caught his fancy. "This is an encrypted Decepticon distress beacon. Autobots can't hack into it, stupid."

"What about the traitor Knock Out?" Thundercracker tried. "Surely, he will know how to find a Decepticon beacon."

Starscream's hands stopped again, and his eyes squeezed shut for a couple of seconds. Thundercracker reached across their bond to brush his brother's erratic spark energy. It felt like trying to grab hold of a frayed, sparking wire. He pulled back for the time being.

"We'll use the beacon to smoke the traitor out," Starscream said, his eyes finally opening again and his hands springing back into motion. "And I'll show him what happens to those who abandon me. Us. The cause. It's… We'll show them."

Thundercracker clenched his fist under the table.

"And if the other Autobots show up, sir?" he said, trying to pull at whatever delusion his brother had gotten stuck in.

"Then we fight, of course," Starscream scoffed, snipping a couple of wires.

"What does Lord Megatron think of this plan?" Thundercracker pressed, and his brother froze in the middle of another wire.

Confusion flitted across the Seeker's face, and he mouthed silently for a moment. One of his hands moved up to press against his chest, and Thundercracker reached across the bond again. The wire was still frayed, but the sparks had all frozen.

"Starscream?" he said, latching onto his brother's energy and trying to keep him _here_. "What's going on?"

"We… Um…" Starscream's frown deepened, and he glanced down at the wire cutters he was gripping. "I'm fixing…"

He looked up sharply, and there was a note of panic in his expression now.

"Where is Megatron?" he demanded.

"He's not here," Thundercracker answered patiently, reaching over to take the wire cutters from his brother's unresisting hand. "Where do _you_ think he is, Star?"

Starscream's panic intensified for a moment, and then his whole energy field smoothed and settled, his eyes sharpening back into their usual, focused glare. "Lord Megatron went to recruit more troops. Honestly, Thundercracker. Keep up with the times."

"Of course," his brother sighed. "Stupid of me to forget." Maybe next time he'd manage to pull his brother all the way back to reality.

Starscream pushed back his chair with a huff and got to his feet, stumbling a little when his left leg tried to collapse beneath him.

"Slagging Predacons," he muttered as he limped across the room. "Shockwave's got a lot to answer for, I'm telling you. Megatron was right to shut that project down when he did."

The kitchen door slid open before Starscream reached it, revealing a sleep-muddled Thrust.

"How generous of you to finally grace us with your presence, Thrust," the Seeker snapped at him. "Do you have any idea what time it is!? Every minute you waste, I shall have Soundwave take out of your personal time!"

The Conehead blinked down at him as he pushed past into the hallway, and then turned to Thundercracker.

"Another one of those days?" he asked.

The other Seeker collapsed onto a clear spot on the table with a groan. "He called me 'Dreadwing.'"

"Ouch," Thrust commiserated, heading for the fridge. "At least you got him away from the wire cutters without a tantrum this time."

"Why me?" Thundercracker despaired. "He never forgets who Skywarp is."

"Yeah, but didn't he, like, raise Skywarp all on his own, or something? After your parents died?" the other mech reminded him as he rummaged through their supplies.

"How'd you know that?" Thundercracker wondered, sitting up slightly.

"Skywarp talks a lot," Thrust explained, pulling out of the fridge with a cube of copper-infused energon in hand. "Don't take it too hard, though, dude. Remember Ramjet used to run into things a bit too hard sometimes? He'd be real confused for a year or two after, but he always got better in the end."

That might have been heartening information if Thundercracker had thought the problem was in his brother's processor. He wished he could ask someone else's opinion, but he still wasn't sure how well he trusted Thrust, and Skywarp… Thundercracker didn't want Skywarp to know what he suspected was wrong with Starscream.

Because Starscream had _not_ raised their brother alone, and telling Skywarp that his parents were never coming home had been hard enough the first time.

Thundercracker straightened up the rest of the way, trying to rub some of the exhaustion out of his face.

"You don't have to stick around, you know," he said as Thrust sank into the chair Starscream had vacated.

The other mech shrugged. "I like being with other fliers," he said. "Anyway, y'all would die of boredom without me."

He pulled a datachip out of his pocket and tossed it to the Seeker. Thundercracker caught it eagerly and read the contents listing: _Grey's Anatomy_ , _Scrubs_ , _House_ , _E.R._ , _Casualty_...

"You said you liked that _General Hospital_ one, right? Those are all more medical dramas," Thrust explained, taking a swig of energon.

Like so many other things about the Conehead's life on Earth, Thundercracker didn't question where he got the human shows from. He was just glad that he bothered.

"Thanks," the Seeker acknowledged, getting to his feet. He turned to leave, paused, and turned back. "By the way, now that Topshift is gone, Warp is probably gonna try and sleep with you sometime in the near future? If you could turn him down, I'd appreciate it."

"Don't worry; I have a conjunx," Thrust chuckled.

Thundercracker blinked. "Since when?"

The other mech considered. "Ten years ago? Something like?"

" _Who?_ " the Seeker wanted to know next. There was a very finite population that Thrust could have possibly pulled from for this supposed conjunx of his, and Thundercracker was well-acquainted with every member of it.

Thrust just winked at him, though.


	6. Chapter 5

**CHAPTER FIVE: In Which Kitty Has a Choice**

As Ultra Magnus descended the stairs to their holding cells, he could hear two voices coming from below: one singing an old Cybertronian love ballad at the top of its lungs and the other screaming at the first to shut up. The first, he recognized as Wheeljack's, which meant the other could only be their newest prisoner. Magnus set his jaw and pushed open the double doors at the bottom of the stairs.

Beyond them lay a long, low hallway lined with heavy doors, the last of which Wheeljack was perched on a stool beside. He stopped singing when he saw who was walking toward him and gave a brief salute.

"Morning, sir," he called.

The other voice rang out from behind the cell door in response: "One more note from you and I'll rip your vocalizer out through your aft when I get out of here!"

"Cut the audio, Wheeljack," Ultra Magnus ordered as he approached. The other mech hit a button beside the cell door, and the Decepticon's voice instantly cut out.

"We hit the jackpot on this one, sir," Wheeljack told him as the commander drew level with him. "He's been giving away information left and right just shouting threats at me."

Ultra Magnus peered in through the little window to see a mech with the typical brutish Decepticon vibe and hot pink hair sulking back at him from the far corner.

"I don't recall this mech being present for any encounters we had with the _Nemesis_ prior to Optimus's separation from the _Ark_ ," he confessed.

"That's because he wasn't a frontliner; he's an engineer," Wheeljack explained. "Left the Decepticons about ten years ago with a squad of rogue Vehicons. So says Knock Out, at least."

Magnus's frown deepened as he turned back to his soldier.

"I don't suppose Knock Out would deign to give us the _Nemesis's_ full crew manifest at the time they landed on Earth at any point?" he huffed. "What happened to those Vehicons, then?"

"Primus only knows," Wheeljack shrugged. "They aren't built for durability. Wouldn't be surprised if living off organic fuels killed 'em all off years ago."

"It is not wise to make assumptions when it comes to the possibility of dangerous Decepticons roaming this planet," his commander chided.

"Well, wherever they are, they've been pretty quiet for the last 25 years," Wheeljack pointed out. "If anything, I'm just wondering why a buncha deserters decided to join up with Starscream again."

"Indeed, I wasn't under the impression he had much loyalty amongst the troops," Ultra Magnus agreed.

"And if he did, why didn't he desert with them?" Wheeljack mused. "Or at least go find them when he finally did try to desert?"

"All excellent questions that hopefully either…" He consulted the datapad in his hand. "Topshift or Knock Out can answer for us."

"So, what're we gonna do with this one?" Wheeljack wanted to know.

"Naturally, we'll give him the same offer as the others, though I don't expect to find him particularly conducive to it," Magnus answered.

"Oh, I dunno," Wheeljack shrugged. "If we make the offer _after_ we've pulled in Screamer and co, he might be more willing to listen. Guess the real question is do we extend the same courtesy to _them_?"

Ultra Magnus looked back down to his datapad and pretended to be reading something while he prevaricated on answering that question. He knew what the answer _should_ be, but that didn't mean he liked it.

"I suppose," he said finally, "that it's what Optimus would have done."

"Yeah, but… _Starscream?_ Really?" Wheeljack made a face.

"I am painfully aware of the myriad reasons many in our midst have for harboring personal resentment toward him, but if Optimus could extend a second chance to Megatron himself, then we can give it to his second, too," Ultra Magnus told him. "Besides, it's not as if he'll actually take it."

Wheeljack shrugged in concession.

The entrance to the cell block opened behind them, and the two mechs turned to see Ratchet striding down the hallway toward them.

"Well, well, well," Wheeljack drawled, face breaking into a crooked smile. "Morning, sunshine."

"Wheeljack, I do believe the doctor has asked you to address him by his proper name," Ultra Magnus scolded before Ratchet could do anything more than scowl.

"My bad," the Wrecker chuckled. "Old habits and all. Anyway, whadda _you_ think, Ratch? Will Starscream take an amnesty deal, or no?"

"He's always been fond of anything liable to save his own hide," the doctor huffed as he came level with them. "Whether he'll abide by its terms for more than ten minutes is the real question. But speaking of giving people chances, what's your plan for Knock Out's tagalong, Commander?"

Ultra Magnus made a noise like his thoughts had just collided with a brick wall. He didn't much want to think about this anymore than what they were going to do if they actually managed to capture Starscream and his brothers, but it was, unfortunately, a much more immediate problem. There were already quite a few messages from Fowler in his inbox.

"If we get rid of her before he has time to get attached…" Magnus started, but Wheeljack was shaking his head.

"Too late," he said. "Knock Out is very much attached to at least the idea of having his own human around. At this point, it would probably be more effective to wait until he gets tired of her."

"At which point she'll know too much for Fowler to let her just walk away," Ratchet pointed out.

"Makes me miss the days when there was an active war going on," Wheeljack sighed. "Humans didn't question anything Optimus told them when they thought the alternative was a rain of Decepticon Pitfire on their homes."

"The humans didn't question anything Optimus told them because he was Optimus," Ratchet returned.

"Fair enough," the other mech conceded. "The big O did have a way about him."

"I am sure I could convince them to see reason," Ultra Magnus put in.

"Oh, yes. When it comes to reasonable things, I have no doubt in your ability to argue a course," Ratchet assured him. "Unless, of course, we happen to have reasons that we don't want to share with our human allies."

"I do not take your meaning, Doctor," his commander frowned.

Ratchet glanced over to Wheeljack and seemed to come to a decision.

"Knock Out talks a lot about wanting to go back to Cybertron as soon as we make our next prison transport run," he started. "I can't help but wonder if it wouldn't be wise to give him some kind of distraction."

Ultra Magnus's eyebrows went up, and Wheeljack let out a bark of laughter.

"Didn't take you for the sort to encourage the idea of arranging comfort for the troops, Doc," he chuckled.

"What they want to do together is their own business; she's a consenting adult," Ratchet huffed. "But better Knock Out's busy trying to impress humans than ask awkward questions."

"He's not as stupid as he acts," Wheeljack pointed out. "He's gonna figure out we're hiding something sooner than later. Might as well get it over with."

"But preferably _after_ hauling in such a potentially sensitive bunch of prisoners," the doctor contradicted. "If he finds out what happened right as we reunite him with some of his best Decepticon 'besties,' as Miko would put it, it could put us in a difficult position."

"Oh, come on, Ratchet. Starscream is fifty percent of the reason Knock Out left the Cons in the first place," Wheeljack snorted.

"Yes, but consider how he might feel about the other two—fellow _ex_ -Decepticons now," Ratchet pointed out. "They did spend millions of years as comrades, don't forget."

Ultra Magnus considered all of this in solemn silence. As Optimus Prime's first officer for the latter part of the war, he'd had access to some excessively thorough files on all of the Decepticon high command (mostly left by his predecessor), so he was well aware that Knock Out had more history with Starscream and his family than probably even Ratchet knew about. What that history meant to the renegade medic was anyone's guess at this point, but Ultra Magnus hadn't led soldiers for more than 30 million years without learning the importance of hedging his bets.

"If you think Knock Out is fickle enough to allow the presence of a single human to distract him from returning to his home—" he began, and Ratchet interrupted with a snort.

"I do," he said. "For a few days, at least. Possibly longer if she's particularly strong-willed."

Wheeljack let out a low whistle. "You have a delightfully savage side to you at times, Doc."

Ratchet bristled slightly. "Knock Out's a complete skeeze bag. It's not our fault if she can't see that."

"I will entertain the concept, as morally questionable as it may be," Ultra Magnus spoke up. "Ultimately, the choice is hers, but you make some valid points, Ratchet."

"Just don't let anyone else find out that's what she's here for," Wheeljack advised. "Bulk for one would probably run her back through the groundbridge himself if he found out."

"Sound advice," his commander agreed, moving toward the controls for the cell door once more. "Now, shall we see what else our friend might be persuaded to tell us?"

Wheeljack grinned and hopped to his feet while Ratchet turned to head back down the hall with a scoff.

"But _I'm_ the morally questionable one," Ultra Magnus heard him mutter as he retreated.

* * *

The sound of shouting was what finally drew Skywarp out of his cabin, where he'd been taking stock of things all morning. It wasn't an uncommon occurrence—he spent so much time sneaking off the ship specifically to avoid Starscream's shouting—but today was unique in that Thundercracker seemed to be making almost as much noise as their oldest brother.

"—if you'd just let me _try!_ " Skywarp heard Starscream's ear-piercing tones emanating from the direction of the engine room.

"You're not going anywhere near it, Starscream! Not until you've slept and proven that you actually know what's going on around you!" Thundercracker shouted back.

"I know exactly what's going on!" the older Seeker insisted. "We've all been in danger from the second those Autobots caught Topshift, and we have maybe a matter of hours to get the ship functional again before they're raining down on us!"

"Starscream, you haven't slept properly in _four days!_ "

"Or showered," Skywarp added as he rounded the corner to find his brothers grappling with one another in front of the entrance to the engine room. They both turned at the sound of his voice.

"Oh, like _you've_ got any right to judge other people's hygiene!" Starscream snarled before resuming his efforts at shoving Thundercracker out his defensive stance.

"You're not going in there!" his brother told him. "Warp, help me out here! He's going to get all of us blown up!"

"I'm just trying to get off this planet and away from you two _maniacs!_ " Starscream grunted as he pushed. One of his arms made a weird spasming motion, and he let out a shriek of frustration before trying to slam his fist into Thundercracker's gut.

"Still can't mechanize?" Skywarp asked, folding his arms and leaning leisurely against the wall.

"Shut up!" his brother screamed back at him. "There's nothing wrong with me that getting off this terrible planet won't fix! Now get—out—of—my— _way!_ "

He punctuated each word with an attempted blow to some part of Thundercracker's anatomy. The last one landed true on his brother's side, and the younger mech grunted before catching Starscream around the waist and lifting him clear off the floor. Skywarp snorted at the poleaxed expression that crossed Starscream's face just before Thundercracker chucked him bodily down the hall.

The smaller mech skidded and rolled several yards before trying to come up in an offensive stance and almost falling flat on his face instead when his left leg didn't come up with the rest of him. By that time, Thundercracker had slammed the engine room doors shut again and was replacing the locks.

"I'm not going down with the rest of you idiots!" Starscream howled, scrambling back to his feet and starting to hobble off down the hall.

"Starscream, get back here!" Thundercracker called after him, looking from the locks to his older brother several times before settling on his younger brother instead. "Warp, go get him!"

Skywarp rolled his eyes and warped into their sorry excuse for a medbay instead. It took him a minute to find what he was looking for, and when he warped back, Starscream had only made it halfway down the hall.

"Couple of useless, slag-eating morons is what you are!" the Seeker was shouting back down the hall at Thundercracker. Skywarp grabbed him round the chest and drove the syringe he'd been carrying into his neck.

Starscream made a strangled sound, eyes widening, before going limp in his younger brother's arms.

" _WARP!_ " Thundercracker called sharply from down the hall, starting to run toward him.

"What?" the other Seeker demanded, lowering their unconscious brother to the floor. "You said he hasn't slept in four days. I figured that was the best option."

"You can't just go jabbing sedatives into people's necks, Warp! Move!" Thundercracker shoved his younger brother aside.

"I'm not _stupid_ , T.C. I wouldn't give him enough to hurt him!" Skywarp protested.

His older brother made an impatient hissing noise at him and started examining Starscream anyway: looking over the hole in his neck, taking his pulse, checking his breathing…

"Why do you care so much?" the younger Seeker grumbled. "He's not even our brother anymore."

"Warp—"

"You know it's true!" Skywarp burst out. "I know you've seen it, too! I look in his eyes and he… It's not Starscream looking back! There's nothing there! He's been gone for years and you're just too scared to admit it!"

TC glared at him, one hand resting protectively on their oldest brother's forehead.

"He's not _gone_ , Warp. He's just broken, and he needs us to help put him back together," he said in a low voice.

"You're as delusional as he is if you think that's ever gonna happen!" Skywarp snapped. "Megatron will come back and get him just like he always does, and that'll be the end of it!"

"Megatron is dead, Warp!"

A ringing silence filled the corridor as Skywarp tried to process that.

"No, he's not," he finally scoffed, but Thundercracker's solemn expression didn't shift. "Why would you think that?"

"Why do you think Starscream's so out of it this last year?" his brother asked. "It's not processor damage, Warp; this is what a broken sparkbond looks like!"

Skywarp looked down at his oldest brother's face, so much more pale and drawn than he'd seen it in years.

"Megatron's not coming. Ever," Thundercracker insisted.

Skywarp teleported out of the ship.

* * *

"The base is haunted?" Kitty repeated, a spoonful of breakfast cereal halting halfway to her mouth.

"Oh, _so_ haunted," Smokescreen yawned, swilling the energon in his cube. "We've tried exorcising it, like, three times, but nothing's worked. Don't mention it to Ratchet, though. It pisses him off."

He would have still been asleep now if he hadn't had to protect the girl from Knock Out's stupidly charming smiles

The girl snorted, settling back in her chair. "What, like, you got a Catholic priest in here to recite some Bible verses?" she wanted to know. "Or a little, old lady with a weird voice? Do the TVs talk to you at night?"

Knock Out laughed, short and fake.

"Smokescreen, stop teasing her already," he said. "Kitty's too smart to fall for that sort of thing."

The younger mech shot him a disapproving look, and then a comm.

 _SK::You're the one who insisted we call the exorcists in the first place.::_

 _KO::Well, clearly she's in the Ratchet camp on this one, so I see no point in emphasizing the facts,::_ he got back.

"It's not a big deal," Kitty was saying in the meantime. "I'm used to being teased by guys. Isn't that, like, the only way you all know how to interact with women?"

"Perhaps for juvenile mechs like Smokescreen here," Knock Out drawled without missing a beat.

Kitty chewed a bite of cereal with a curious expression for a moment. "Mechs?" she wondered. "Is that what you call yourselves instead of 'people?'"

"No, that's what we call ourselves instead of men," the medic explained. "Mechs and femmes, not men and women. Our species' genders are somewhat less rigidly defined than yours. Makes for some interesting times in the bedroom."

He shot a wink across the table at her, and Smokescreen rolled his eyes. To her credit, Kitty looked more or less unfazed by this news.

"Oh, for sure," she said. "Human gender roles have all kinds of issues."

"He's not talking about roles," Smokescreen muttered into his cube, and then pretended not to notice when the girl turned a questioning look on him. He was not about to be the one to explain Cybertronian genitals to a member of a predominantly binary-gendered alien race.

"So, how did you all end up on Earth, anyway?" Kitty asked when it became clear she wasn't going to get any more information about alien sex right now.

"Well, _I_ escaped from a Decepticon prison ship, and the pod I hijacked landed me here," Smokescreen recounted, lowering his cube once more.

"Yes, and he was on the prison ship in the first place because he got beaten up by literally the oldest Cybertronian ever," Knock Out cut in, lazily swirling his own energon.

"He didn't beat me up; he knocked me out with his weird Prime magic," the younger mech protested.

"Magic?" Kitty suddenly perked up even more.

"No, just science that we don't understand," Knock Out contradicted.

"Some people say that's the definition of magic anyway," the girl shrugged.

"See? The human agrees with me," Smokescreen smirked.

Knock Out was opening his mouth to retort when a comm dropped into both their inboxes.

 _UM::Bring the human girl to my office. Now.::_

The medic's jaw snapped shut again and Smokescreen heaved a sigh.

"What?" Kitty wanted to know, looking between the two of them.

"The commander wants to see you," Knock Out told her.

For the first time, a hint of nervousness crept into the girl's eyes.

"Don't worry," Smokescreen told her. "He's only scary for show."

* * *

Ultra Magnus was just about everything that Kitty had felt was missing from the Autobots' base the previous evening: a stony-faced man (or mech, she supposed) with a long, military-style coat who exuded authority from his every pore. The gray-streaked aquamarine hair was a bit jarring, but she'd watched enough anime to accept unconventional hair colors in her authority figures. His office gave new meaning to the word "pristine," and it took Kitty's eyes a moment to adjust to the gleaming white walls.

When Knock Out first ushered her into the office, the commander was standing at the window with a mug of the same luminous blue substance that she'd seen the other Cybertronians drinking that morning and some kind of tablet in the other.

"Good morning, Ms. Jenkins," he greeted her, sparing Knock Out no more than a cursory glance. "I trust you slept well."

"Well enough, sir," she replied.

There was a pause, during which the Cybertronian's icy blue gaze seemed to bore straight through Kitty's skull, and then he gestured to the metal chair in front of his desk. "You may sit."

She complied, perching ramrod straight on the edge of the it while her mind raced through all the possible outcomes of this meeting. From what she understood, whether or not she got to stay in alien robot paradise hinged entirely on this mech's opinion of her.

Meanwhile, Knock Out continued to hover somewhere over her shoulder, and Ultra Magnus took his seat behind the desk, setting the tablet and mug down in front of himself. His frown deepened, and he spent a moment adjusting the tablet by miniscule degrees before apparently deciding that its position was satisfactory and turning back to his guest.

"Ms. Jenkins," he began, "I would first like to extend my sincerest apologies that the actions of my squadron have brought your life into disarray."

"It's no trouble, really," Kitty shrugged.

"It is more trouble than you have had time to consider, I'm afraid," the commander told her. "You do realize, Ms. Jenkins, that you are now privy to a massive state secret, and will henceforth be subjected to intense scrutiny from your own government in addition to potentially finding yourself the target of foreign powers seeking information about us and our technology?"

"I… had considered it," the girl murmured, her stomach fluttering uncomfortably.

"Indeed," Ultra Magnus grunted. "Have you considered your next move, then?"

"Um…" Kitty blinked at him, her gaze sliding toward the sliver of Knock Out visible from the corner of her eye.

"'Um' is a pointless noise with no place in respectable conversation. I must ask you not to utter it in my presence."

The girl felt her eyebrows rise as her eyes snapped forward again. This was worse than talking to her rhetoric professor. She gripped the edge of her chair before continuing:

"I had put some thought into what might happen next, but I don't really have a solid enough frame of reference for all this to form any sort of expectation, sir."

Ultra Magnus examined her for a moment, and then nodded.

"I'm glad to see you have some kind of sense and critical thinking skills," he commented. "Your options at this point are two-fold: stay on with us and receive training to be of some use to our organization, or submit to your government's routine memory erasure procedures."

"Their what?" Kitty wanted to know.

"The procedure is simple and painless," the commander assured her. "I believe they simply flash a light at you, whose frequency causes the brain to overwrite a predetermined length of time in the memory files."

"Like in _Men in Black?_ " Kitty couldn't stop herself asking.

Behind her, Knock Out made a strangled noise that he quickly turned into a cough.

"Did you have something to add, Doctor?" Ultra Magnus addressed him.

"Nossir," the mech wheezed, thumping theatrically at his chest. "Just choking on my own spit."

His commander made a noise of disbelief and turned back to Kitty. "At any rate, there is a possibility for you to simply return to your ordinary life if that is what you desire."

"Do I have to decide right away?" Kitty asked, side-eyeing Knock Out again when Ultra Magnus glanced down at his tablet. The mech threw her a wink, and she turned forward again with her stomach swooping from more than nerves.

"I believe a period of time for you to acquaint yourself with our situation and personnel would be more than acceptable," Ultra Magnus told her. "Of course, you will not be allowed to leave the base until your government has completed extensive background checks to ensure you are not a spy."

"How long will that take?" the girl wanted to know.

"That depends on what they find, I imagine," the commander replied.

"And what would I do in the meantime?"

"That is entirely up to you," he said. "You certainly seem to have taken a shine to Knock Out, for whatever reason. Perhaps he'd enjoy the company for once. If not, there are plenty other members of our faction who I'm sure would be more than happy to show you the ropes."

"Wait, so I get to keep her?" Knock Out blurted suddenly, and Kitty blinked at the unusual wording.

"We have been over this, Doctor," Ultra Magnus sighed. "Humans are not pets."

"Tell that to Bulkhead," the other mech snorted.

"But yes, you may continue to associate with Kitty," his commander finished, giving him a warning look. "If you behave."

"Oh, of course. Autobot's honor," Knock Out grinned.

"Something you have yet to claim," Ultra Magnus muttered, glancing down at a notification on his tablet before looking back to Kitty. "Is that the course of action you wish to pursue then, Ms. Jenkins?"

Kitty caught herself just before an "Um" could escape her mouth. "Yes, I think so," she said instead.

"Understood," the commander nodded, picking up his tablet once more. "I will inform our government liaison of the situation, and you will be granted level one clearance throughout our facilities. This will allow you access to all common areas and the residential wing. I will endeavor to check in with you regularly to assess your progress. You may go."

It was such an abrupt end to the conversation that it took Kitty a second to register what he'd said.

"Th… that's all?" she stammered.

"Did you have a question?" he asked, glancing up at her.

Too many to know where to begin.

"Will I be able to contact my family? Just to let them know I'm okay," the girl settled for. "And… and my job and school."

"I'm sure something can be arranged," Ultra Magnus agreed. "Have Rafael assist her in sending a secure message at some point, Knock Out."

"Sure thing, Commander," the other mech agreed, reaching for Kitty's arm. "We'll catch you later. So much to do, so little time, you know?"

His commander gave him a wry look and a grunt of acknowledgment before turning his attention completely to his tablet, and Kitty allowed herself to be led back out of the office to the hallway where Smokescreen was waiting for them.

"So, how'd it go?" he wanted to know the second the door had closed behind them.

"He's letting her stay!" Knock Out hissed excitedly.

"What!? And that was your choice, too?" Smokescreen demanded, turning to Kitty.

"I mean… the only other option was having my memory erased, so…" the girl shrugged.

For some reason, both Knock Out and Smokescreen exchanged a look at that before devolving into half-stifled snorts of laughter.

"We, um…" Knock Out sniggered. "We may or may not have told him that _Men in Black_ was a dramatization of historical events so he'd let us watch it on the projector in the hangar bay a few weeks ago."

Kitty's mouth dropped open.

"You didn't!" she gasped.

"In our defense, we didn't think he'd believe us," Smokescreen put in.

"So, there isn't any memory wiping procedure?" Kitty concluded.

"Not that I know of," Knock Out shrugged. "Fowler probably would've used it to get rid of Miko ages ago if there was. Anyway, let's go find something to do before Magnus can change his mind."

Kitty followed the two of them down the hall, pushing aside the voice in the back of her head that wondered, _If they can't erase your memory, what_ will _they do if you don't want to stay?_ Why worry about it when there was no way she'd ever want to give this up?

* * *

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"Primus, Warp!" Thundercracker gasped, just barely saving the datapad that had gone flying out of his hands when his little brother popped into existence in his cabin. Skywarp folded his arms unrepentantly.

"It's been a whole year," he said. "How long have you known, and why didn't you tell me?"

He waited patiently while the other Seeker ran a hand over the back of his neck and glanced over at the bunk where their oldest brother was sleeping.

"Almost as soon as we picked up Starscream," he finally confessed, setting the datapad aside. "First I was just trying to figure out how to tell you because I didn't know how the news would affect you after all that's happened, and then… Skywarp, you've been such an aft to Star this last year, I was afraid you would use it to hurt him."

"You were not," Skywarp snapped, because there was no way Thundercracker would ever think him _that_ callous. "You were afraid it would hurt _you_."

Thundercracker opened his mouth to protest.

"Aaah!" Skywarp cut him off with a wave of his hand. "Whatever! Who cares? I know now, so let's just move on."

"You're the one who asked," his brother muttered.

Skywarp ignored him and crossed the room instead to sink down on the edge of Starscream's bunk. The older mech shifted slightly as the mattress dipped, rolling toward the new heat source.

"So, Starscream's free now, isn't he?" Skywarp mused, watching his brother's sleeping face.

"It'll probably take a few years for his spark to equalize again, but… yeah. Technically, yeah," Thundercracker agreed.

"Technically?"

"Skywarp, he was living in an abusive sparkbond for millions of years," his brother sighed. "He's not gonna be okay all of a sudden just because Megatron's dead. I mean, I don't think he ever completely stopped hoping that things would go back to the way they were."

Skywarp hummed, hugging himself with one arm and leaning forward to rest his chin on his other hand.

"So… You're not upset about it?" Thundercracker spoke after a moment.

"I finished mourning Megatron eons ago," Skywarp muttered.

"Then why did you run this afternoon?" his brother asked him quietly.

Skywarp didn't answer, keeping his gaze trained on a pair of socks lying on the opposite side of the floor.

"He was basically your dad, Warp," the other Seeker started up again. "I wouldn't blame you if—"

"It was just surprising, okay!?" Skywarp snapped, straightening up. "I needed time to think. That's all."

Thundercracker blinked at him, and then reached for his datapad again.

"Fine, fine," he muttered, rising from the chair. "Just promise you won't say anything about it to Starscream. I don't think he's ready to face it yet."

Skywarp gave a grunt of acknowledgment, and his brother hesitated a moment longer in the doorway before walking off with a heavy sigh. When the door had shut behind him, Skywarp finally reached out and brushed a lock of hair out of Starscream's face, tracing his fingers over the familiar curve of his brow bone and down the side of his cheek the way he used to as a sparkling. He continued down to the mark on the side of his brother's neck where he'd jabbed the syringe into him earlier, and closed his hand over it.

"Sorry," he murmured.

There was no reply but for the even rush of air in and out of Starscream's vents. After a moment, Skywarp glanced up at the closed door, and then carefully started sliding his brother aside on the bunk so there was room to lie out next to him. Starscream murmured something indeterminate in his sleep and shifted a bit with the jostling, but didn't wake.

Skywarp lay there, watching his brother's sleeping face from across the pillow for a long while. They were close enough that he didn't have to try to feel Starscream's energy swirling fitfully alongside his own and Thundercracker's. The younger Seeker shuffled closer still until he could press his forehead and nose against Starscream's.

"Come home already," he murmured.

There was no change in Starscream's spark energy. Skywarp closed his eyes and let himself relax further into the mattress. Just for a moment, he could at least pretend that everything was going to be okay now.


End file.
